US hostage killed in Iraq, parties hold talks

The body of a kidnapped US peace activist was found bound and shot in Baghdad, police said yesterday, while President George W. Bush warned Americans of more fighting and sacrifice before US troops could come home.

Sunni and Shi'ite leaders, struggling to break a deadlock over forming a national unity government to tackle the threat of civil war, held the first coalition talks since the bombing of a Shi'ite mosque sparked a wave of sectarian violence.

Reprisal killings, which cost hundreds of lives and plunged Iraq into its worst crisis since US-led forces invaded in March 2003, prompted Sunni parties to boycott negotiations.

Police said the body of Tom Fox, kidnapped in November with three colleagues by a group calling itself the Swords of Truth, was discovered on Thursday with the hands tied and a single gunshot wound to the head at a rubbish dump in western Baghdad.

The American, who had campaigned against what he called the dehumanisation of the US occupation, appeared to have been beaten with electric cables before his death, said a policeman who found the body beside a railway line.

The kidnappers, one of many armed groups that have seized more than 200 foreigners and thousands of Iraqis since the US-led invasion, had threatened to kill the four members of the Christian Peacemaker Teams unless US forces and Iraqi authorities freed all prisoners in their custody.

There was no word on the fate of Fox's three colleagues.

A US embassy spokeswoman said Fox's body was on its way back to the United States. She had no comment on his death. Fears about Fox's fate were raised earlier this week when Arabic television station Al Jazeera aired a video dated February 28 showing only fellow kidnapped activists Briton Norman Kember and Canadians James Loney and Harmeet Sooden.

The three looked well and did not appear distressed. Three years after US-led forces invaded Iraq to oust Saddam Hussein, sectarian violence sparked by the Febrary 22 bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra has raised the spectre of civil war, denting Americans' hopes for a troop withdrawal.

Iraq's divided political leaders are deadlocked over a new prime minister that has stalled the formation of a US- sponsored national unity government of Shi'ites, Sunnis and Kurds, seen by Washington as essential to calm tensions.

One day after President Jalal Talabani postponed the first session of parliament until March 19 to give parties more time to agree on key posts, leaders from the ruling Shi'ite Alliance and the Iraqi Accordance Front, the biggest Sunni Arab political grouping, held talks to try to end the impasse.

The Alliance, the largest bloc in parliament, has said it will not succumb to pressure from Kurds and Sunnis to drop its choice of Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, whom critics say has failed to bring stability or prosperity. After the mosque attack, which led to reprisals against Iraq's minority Sunnis, the Front said it would not return to coalition talks until a list of ten conditions were met. Talabani said on Friday most conditions had been met.

Sunnis, dominant under Saddam, form the backbone of an insurgency.

In his weekly radio address, Bush, battling low approval ratings before mid-term congressional elections in November, said he hoped Iraqi forces would be in a position to police more territory than US troops by the year-end. This would allow for a reduction in the 130,000 US troops.

Fox, a father of two, expressed concern in an article the day before his abduction about the dehumanisation of Iraqis.

Saddam is due to return to court today.