Abducted US soldiers found dead in Iraq

The bodies of the two American soldiers abducted last week south of Baghdad have been found, a United States military spokesman said yesterday. Insurgents have claimed they had been killed by the new leader of al-Qa'ida in Iraq in person.

Kristian Menchaca and Thomas Tucker, the army privates, had been missing since Friday when they were apparently seized in a clash with militants near the town of Yusifiya, in which a third US serviceman was killed.

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The remains of the two men had been recovered after a search in which 8,000 US and Iraqi troops took part, but the spokesman declined to give a cause of death. The bodies were found on Monday on a street in Yusifiya, but could not be removed until yesterday because the area was feared to have been booby-trapped.

Major-General William Caldwell, the chief US military spokesman in Baghdad, said the cause of death was "undeterminable at this point". But an Iraqi Defence Ministry official said the bodies had shown signs of torture - as was also claimed by a statement posted yesterday on a website often used by Islamist radicals.

Abu Hamza al-Mujahir - named last week by al-Qa'ida as successor to the late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi - had "slit the throats" of the two soldiers, the statement said, adding that the new leader had been "graced by God Almighty with the implementation of the sentence".

The message was apparently issued by the Mujahedeen Shura Council, an umbrella organisation of six insurgent groups as well as al-Qa'ida, which had vowed new attacks to avenge Zarqawi, who was killed on 7 June when two US jets bombed the safe house north of Baghdad in which he was hiding.

It did not, however, appear on the site normally used by the insurgents, and some US analysts suggested it might be a fake, intended to endow Mujahir with a similar mystique to Zarqawi, said to have personally carried out the beheading of at least two captured American hostages in 2004. Whatever the exact circumstances of their deaths, the killing of the two soldiers only serves to underline how violence continues to plague Iraq, despite the elimination of Zarqawi and the continuing security sweep in Baghdad involving 40,000 troops.

Yesterday alone, at least three people were killed in a car bomb in a market in Baghdad's Sadr City district, while two Iraqis died and 28 were injured in an explosion at a clothes market in the centre of Baghdad. In the southern city of Basra, at least one woman was killed when a suicide bomber blew himself up inside an old people's home.

Even in Baghdad, the US and Iraqi military presence is struggling to make a difference - as a senior Iraqi Defence Ministry official admitted yesterday, acknowledging how local sectarian militias were "interfering" with the clampdown. "We cannot operate effectively if there are people out there who are carrying weapons," Major-General Abdul Aziz Mohammed said.

Washington and Baghdad, however, insist that the strike against Zarqawi has driven a real stake into the heart of the insurgency. Maj-Gen Caldwell said US forces had killed what he described as the former leader's "right-hand man" in a raid in Yusifiya on Friday - the same day Privates Menchaca and Tucker were kidnapped.

Mansur al-Mashhadani was travelling in a car with two associates when he was spotted by US troops. When he tried to flee, the vehicle was destroyed in a strike from the air, Maj-Gen Caldwell said. In Washington, Vice-President Dick Cheney this week repeated his celebrated assertion of a year ago that the insurgency was "in its last throes".