Headless body found after hostage murder boast

A headless corpse was found in Baghdad today hours after an al-Qaida-linked group boasted it had killed a second American hostage, leaving the Briton they are holding to face execution.

The body was found in the Amiriya neighbourhood and handed over to US forces, said Interior Ministry official Colonel Adnan Abdul-Rahman.

It was found in a black plastic bag. The head was found with the body.

The grisly discovery came as Iraqi authorities, together with US forces, have decided to free one of only two high-profile women prisoners currently in American custody, a Justice Ministry spokesman said in Baghdad. The US military said it was not aware of such a decision.

Ministry spokesman Noori Abdul-Rahim Ibrahim denied the decision was linked to a demand by the terrorists who abducted the two Americans and Briton Kenneth Bigley calling for the release of all female Iraqi prisoners.

“The Iraqi authorities have agreed with coalition forces to conditionally release Rihab Rashid Taha on bail,” Ibrahim said. “The decision has nothing to do with the threat made by the kidnappers.”

Taha, a scientist became known as Dr Germ for helping Saddam Hussein’s regime make weapons out of anthrax.

The terror group led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who has a $25m (€20m) US bounty on his head, claimed last night to have killed the second of two American hostages after a 24-hour deadline ran out for meeting its demand to release women prisoners.

The claim, posted on a website under the pseudonym Abu Maysara al-Iraqi, could not be verified.

His postings have in the past proved correct, but a video of the killing by Jordanian militant al-Zarqawi’s Tawhid and Jihad group that was pledged to be released “soon” had not materialised by early today.

American engineer Eugene Armstrong, 52, was the first of three men abducted Thursday to be killed, apparently on Monday, and graphic footage of his beheading was posted on Islamic Web sites within an hour of an al-Iraqi statement promising it.

American Jack Hensley, who would have been 49 today, and Kenneth Bigley, 62, from Liverpool, were kidnapped with Armstrong. The brief statement did not identify the latest victim by name, but indicated it was Hensley.

“The nation’s zealous sons slaughtered the second American hostage … after the end of the deadline … We will provide you with film of the slaughter soon, God willing,” said the statement.

The US Central Intelligence Agency determined with a ”high degree of confidence” that al-Zarqawi was the masked militant who read out the lengthy statement before drawing a knife and beheading Armstrong.

President George Bush condemned Armstrong’s killing during a meeting in New York with interim Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi.

“We all stand in solidarity with the American that is now being held captive,” Bush said in remarks less than two hours before the new claim surfaced.

In London, Bigley’s family also has appealed to British Prime Minister Tony Blair. “Please meet the demands and release my father – two women for two men. … Only you can save him now,” Craig Bigley, 33, said in a videotaped statement.

The US military says the other women in its custody in Iraq is Huda Salih Mahdi Ammash, a biotech researcher known as Mrs Anthrax.

Sheik Abdul-Sattar Abdul-Jabbar, a member of the Association of Muslim Scholars, conservative Iraqi clerics who oppose the US presence in Iraq but have interceded in the past to win the release of foreign hostages, questioned the claim of only two female prisoners in US and British custody.

Abdul-Jabbar said there were “tens, perhaps hundreds of Iraqi women prisoners in the occupation’s jail that were supposed to be released before this tragedy”.