US hostage killed in Iraq, parties hold talks

The body of a kidnapped American peace activist was found bound and shot in Baghdad, police said on Saturday. Sunni Arab and Shia political leaders, struggling to break a deadlock over the formation of a national unity government, held coalition talks for the first time since the bombing of an important Shia mosque set off a wave of sectarian violence.
Reprisal killings, which cost hundreds of lives and plunged Iraq into its worst crisis since US-led forces invaded three years ago, prompted Sunni parties to boycott negotiations.
Police said Tom Fox, kidnapped in November with three colleagues by a group calling itself the Swords of Truth, was discovered on Thursday with his hands tied and a single gunshot wound to the head at a garbage dump in western Baghdad.
Fox, who had been in Iraq to campaign against the "dehumanisation" of the US occupation, appeared to have been beaten with electric cables before his death, according to 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 the Iraqi authorities freed all prisoners in their custody.
A US embassy spokeswoman said Fox's body was on its way back to the United States. She had no comment on his death.
SUBSTANTIVE TALKS Three years after US-led forces invaded Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein, sectarian violence sparked by the February 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 Shias, 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 Shia Alliance and the Iraqi Accordance Front, the biggest Sunni Arab political grouping, held substantive talks to try to end the impasse.
On Saturday, gunmen killed a senior editor for Iraqi state television and his driver in Baghdad. Amjad Hameed was the second Iraqi journalist to be killed in a week.