Two Japanese hostages freed

Kidnappers freed two Japanese hostages in Baghdad yesterday, a day after a captured US soldier was paraded in footage on an Arab television channel.

Guns fell silent in Falluja, west of Baghdad, where air strikes and clashes have punctuated a shaky truce, but a US spokesman said time was running out for talks aimed at ending fighting between rebels and US Marines.

The two Japanese, Jumpei Yasuda and Nobutaka Watanabe, were unshaven and looked tired but in good health as they were handed over to Japanese diplomats at Baghdad's Um al-Qura mosque.

Insurgents have seized more than 40 foreigners this month. Most have been released, although an Italian has been killed.

US President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair vowed in Washington on Friday to stamp out violence in Iraq, where US-led forces are battling guerrillas in mainly Sunni central Iraq and trying to snuff out a revolt by a Shi'ite militia in the south.

In mostly Sunni Falluja, a leading American official, Richard Jones, joined week-old peace talks with city leaders, senior US spokesman Dan Senor told a news conference.

"We are hopeful about their intentions," he said. "Our overriding question is can they deliver and, if so, can they do so expeditiously? Time is running out."

One resident in the city of 300,000 told a reporter: "For the first time in days, Falluja is completely calm."

US Marines launched a crackdown in the city on April 5 after the gruesome killings of four American private security guards, ambushed in the town the previous week.

US officials want their killers brought to justice and the disarming of an estimated 1,000 to 2,000 fighters in Falluja, where they say foreign Islamist militants are also operating.

The captors of US Private Keith Maupin, seized after an attack on a road convoy west of Baghdad last week, released a videotape on Friday that showed him surrounded by masked gunmen.

Maupin, one of two missing US soldiers, identified himself in a soft voice on the videotape.

The two freed Japanese hostages said they had been well treated during their three days of captivity.

"We had a good meal every day," Yasuda said. "We were caught around Abu Ghraib (on the outskirts of Baghdad) and after that we were blindfolded and changed house every day."

Three other Japanese were freed on Thursday, but several foreigners are still missing, including a US contractor, a Palestinian, a Dane, a Jordanian and three Italians. Captors have threatened to kill the Italians one by one unless Rome withdraws its troops from Iraq.

The insurgency in the south is led by the radical Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who is holed up in the holy city of Najaf with 2,500 US soldiers poised outside vowing to kill or capture him and dismantle his Mehdi Army.

About 200 supporters, including some wounded militiamen, filed into his office yesterday to seek his blessing.

"If the Americans attack Najaf this will be zero hour and mass revolution. It will be a Shi'ite-American confrontation," Sadr's spokesman Qays al-Khazali told a news conference.

"The negotiations are stalled," he said. "I don't have any hope. I don't see a real desire from the other side."

Senor said no direct negotiating track with Sadr existed, but acknowledged contacts with various intermediaries.

US officials say Sadr, who is wanted in connection with the murder of a moderate Shi'ite cleric a year ago, must not only face justice in an Iraqi court but also disband his forces.

The commander of US troops outside Najaf for the past few days said their presence had made a difference.

"Sadr has got nervous," Colonel Dana Pittard of the 3rd Brigade Task Force told reporters. "Sadr's militia moved into the city instead of operating freely in the area."

US officials said one soldier had died of his wounds after an attack by militiamen near Najaf on Friday. Two militiamen were also killed.

Shi'ite clerics have worked hard to avert a bloody showdown in Najaf and its shrines, but a spokesman for one of the city's four grand ayatollahs said the Shi'ite religious establishment was not directly involved in talks.

April has been Iraq's bloodiest month since Saddam Hussein was ousted a year ago. The US military has lost at least 93 soldiers in combat so far since March 31 - more than the total killed in the three-week war that toppled Saddam.

The climate of insecurity prompted the US military to close highways One and Eight, north and south of Baghdad, indefinitely. It said guerilla attacks had made them unsafe for civilian use, and they needed repair.

A series of blasts shook central Baghdad yesterday. A roadside bomb, apparently aimed at a US patrol, wounded an Iraqi civilian, police said. Two mortar bombs hit a busy district, wounding a Sudanese national, witnesses said.