Two senior Sunni clerics killed in Iraq, death threat hangs over US and UK hostages

The threat of execution hung over a Briton and two American hostages as a 48-hour deadline set by their militant captors for the US-led coalition to free all Iraqi female detainees ran out Monday.
And the spectre of inter-confessional strife loomed over the war-torn country after two senior Sunni Muslim clerics were assassinated in Baghdad over the past 24 hours.
Despite the rampant violence overwhelming the country, Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, meeting his British counterpart Tony Blair in London, vowed he would not let the spiralling bloodshed upset plans for January elections.
But in an interview with an Arabic newspaper published Monday, Allawi revealed that he himself had escaped four attempts on his life since his government took over from the US-led occupation on June 28, the last one just five days ago.
US and British officials were silent Monday about the fate of the three foreign contractors taken at gunpoint from their posh Baghdad home last Thursday.
Purported loyalists of suspected al Qaeda operative Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi served a two-day deadline early Saturday to release Iraqi women from prison or see Americans Jack Hensley and Eugene Armstrong and British engineer Kenneth Bigley executed.
Blair's office said the British government was "monitoring the situation very closely."
Al Qaeda-linked group Ansar al-Sunna claimed to have executed three Kurdish soldiers taken hostage in Taji, north of Baghdad, in a statement posted on an Islamist website.
A Turkish company confirmed Monday that 10 of its employees in Iraq had been taken hostage, but declined to say whether it would pull out from the war-torn country to save their lives.
Three Lebanese and their Iraqi driver were also reported missing.
A spokesman for the Committee of Muslim Scholars in Iraq announced consecutively the assassinations of two of the organisation's top clerics in Baghdad.
The exact circumstances of their death remained unclear, but one of them was an Imam for an isolated Sunni mosque in the overwhelmingly Shia slum of Sadr City.
In Iraq's Shia heartland, a security official for one of the country's two major Shiite parties - the Supreme Council For Islamic Revolution In Iraq - was assassinated, a SCIRI spokesman said. He was the Badr Organisation's second official to be killed in a week.
In other attacks, a man was killed and his wife and son seriously wounded by a roadside bomb near the oil refinery town of Baiji, north of Baghdad.