Iraqis Capture 7 Halliburton Employees

Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the head of US occupation force in the country, told reporters in Washington from Baghdad on Monday that the seven contractors worked for Kellog, Brown and Root.
Two US soldiers were also missing after the attack on Friday.

Czechs abducted

Also on Monday, it was reported that two Czech nationals have been abducted north of Baghdad.
"They were taken on Sunday at around 11:00 am (07:00 GMT) by armed men in Taji," about 10km north of Baghdad, Salam Mizhir, owner of the taxi company transporting them to Jordan told AFP.
The Czech embassy in Baghdad said the two were employees of Czech public television station Ceska Televize.
The Czechs were the latest foreigners to be kidnapped in Iraq since armed groups started taking captives as bargaining chips following the launch of a major US-led counter-offensive against resistance fighters.

Missing Chinese

Seven Chinese were reported to be missing on Monday. They entered Iraq from Jordan early on Sunday and were abducted in Falluja, the Iraqi foreign ministry and a Chinese diplomat in Baghdad said on Monday.
The men were from eastern Fujian province, which has a long tradition of being the source of illegal immigrants travelling overseas in search of work.
Chinese security sources in Fujian told Aljazeera the hostages went to Iraq on their own responsibility. "No Chinese organisation or company has sent them to Iraq," the sources added.

Captives released

On Sunday, a British contractor and eight others held by Iraqi kidnappers were freed, but the fate of three Japanese and an American captive remained unclear.
A videotape aired by Aljazeera TV on Sunday showed the frightened captives holding their passports and giving their nationalities. The hostages were seen guarded by masked men with arms.
The hostages were three Pakistanis, two Turks, an Indian, a Nepali and one from the Philippines.
The Iraqi group said the hostages were drivers of lorries used in transporting supplies to occupation troops in Iraq.
"We have released them in response to a call from the Association of Muslim Scholars ... after we were sure that they will not deal with the occupation forces again," the group said in the tape.

Japanese hostages

Meanwhile, uncertainty still surrounds the fate of the Japanese hostages with their captors threatening to kill them unless Japan withdraws its forces.
A self-styled "Iraqi mediator" told Aljazeera TV on Sunday the captors would start killing the Japanese hostages on Monday if Tokyo did not begin withdrawing its troops.
Aljazeera also received a letter from the families of the Japanese hostages, pleading for information and backing their captors' demand for Tokyo to pull its troops out of the war-ravaged country.

Also on Sunday, Aljazeera TV aired a tape showing the bodies of two men reported to be US intelligence officers killed in Falluja.
A voice on the tape said the two Americans were CIA officers working in Iraq.
The tape showed the bloodied bodies of two foreign men lying on the ground, one shot in the back and another in the leg, surrounded by several Iraqi men. It was not clear when the footage was filmed or by whom.

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/82B928DF-E13A-4FFB-A33B-20DEEC583234.htm