French authorities have received increasing contacts and information about a French journalist taken hostage in Iraq, Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin said today.

A judge on the special tribunal that will put Saddam Hussein and members of his former regime on trial was assassinated in the Iraqi capital, according to an Iraqi police official and a media report.

Kidnapped French journalist Florence Aubenas appeared on a video today almost eight weeks since she disappeared after leaving her Baghdad hotel.

A video delivered to an international news organisation has apparently shown the release of two Indonesian journalists who were kidnapped in the volatile Iraqi city of Ramadi last week.

Two Indonesian journalists were missing in the turbulent Iraqi city of Ramadi, the country’s Foreign Ministry said today, stopping short of saying they’d been abducted by insurgents.

Gunmen waylaid a minibus carrying foreign technicians to their jobs at a mobile telephone company in western Baghdad today, seizing four Egyptians in the second kidnapping of foreigners in the Iraqi capital within a week.

An Italian woman journalist was kidnapped near Baghdad University today.

The French prime minister appeared to suggest today that the disappearance of a woman reporter in Iraq may not be a simple kidnapping, saying her situation is different from that of two other journalists who were held hostage there.

The French reporter who disappeared in Iraq last week has probably been abducted, her newspaper said today.

The disappearance of a French reporter and her interpreter in Iraq is "worrying", Foreign Minister Michel Barnier said in Paris today.

A French reporter and her interpreter are missing in Iraq, the newspaper Liberation said today.