Two suicide car bombs killed 11 people in an attack on a police highway patrol in Baghdad Thursday, one of the deadliest strikes on the capital since Iraq's elections more than 10 weeks ago.
The powerful blasts, which sent plumes of black smoke into the air over Baghdad, came as the US government was scrambling to rescue a US hostage in the clutches of militants who want America to leave Iraq.
The twin car bombs exploded at 10 am (0600 GMT) in the southeastern Jadriyah district of the capital, near an interior ministry building, Baghdad University and the Australian embassy, an interior ministry source said.
An AFP reporter at the scene saw five bodies, one of them a child, and seven cars completely destroyed, one engulfed in flames.
At least 11 people were killed and 35 wounded, most of them police, the ministry source said.
"The first car bomb was really intense, the second was smaller. There was small arms fire afterwards," said a contractor who lives in a hotel near the scene.
The blast came as rebels escalated their attacks in Baghdad ahead of the forming of Iraq's new government more than 10 weeks after January 30 election. Two car bombs and one booby trap device exploded in the capital Tuesday, wounding six people.
US officials have suggested the Sunni-based insurgency is in the throes of crisis as some nationalist elements consider testing the political waters, while radical Islamists aim to rally the embittered Sunni minority with a spectacular attack.
This month, an army of insurgents mounted an assault on the US-run Abu Ghraib prison west of Baghdad, blowing up two car bombs, while on Monday, rebels exploded three car bombs outside a US base near the Syrian border.
Meanwhile, a US hostage was shown crying, pleading for his life and demanding US forces leave Iraq, in a video aired Wednesday by Al-Jazeera satellite television.
A US embassy spokesman said the hostage in the video footage was probably Jeffrey Ake, a subcontractor kidnapped on Monday.
The man was abducted by eight hooded men who drove up in two cars to a poorly guarded construction site near Taji, north of Baghdad, said a security source.
"They overran the meagre security at the site, went right to him and took him. They could have been observing him, he could have been betrayed by somebody there," said the source.
He said Ake had been travelling to the site from Baghdad over the past week with an Iraqi engineer and was believed to have been working on a water purification plant project.
The hostage, who was shown surrounded by three masked men armed with rifles as he sat behind a wooden desk, called on Washington to "open a dialogue with the Iraqi resistance" to save his life, the Arab satellite channel said.
He also urged US forces to promptly pull out of Iraq, according to the Qatar-based channel, as he cried holding what looked like a passport and identification card to his chest.
The White House said the safety of the hostage was "a high priority" but indicated the United States would not negotiate with his captors.
The video was a gruesome throwback to the videos of last year in Iraq, showing desperate Westerners, begging for their lives before being beheaded by their captors after coalition governments failed to meet their demands.
On a visit to Iraq on Tuesday, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld refused to put a timetable on the withdrawal of the some 140,000 US soldiers stationed in the country.
Both President Jalal Talabani and prime minister-designate Ibrahim al-Jaafari, who met Rumsfeld, have said US forces are needed in Iraq to hold the country together and stave off civil war.
Meanwhile, a suicide car bomb exploded outside a US base in Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit Thursday, wounding one US soldier and two Iraqi troops, the military said.
US Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick held talks Wednesday in Baghdad with Jaafari after visiting the former rebel bastion of Fallujah where he met Iraqi civilians and local leaders.
On the political front, it was unclear when the next government would be unveiled. Outgoing foreign minister Hoshyar Zebari predicted it would be at the next parliament session scheduled for Sunday.
But Jaafari was far more conservative.
"The announcement will be made after we complete the search for all the cabinet posts... This is going to take some time," Jaafari said Wednesday, citing efforts to woo "political forces outside the government".
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