Iraqis take Pole hostage

Meanwhile, a different militant group claimed in a video yesterday to have obtained a large amount of explosives missing from a munitions depot facility in Iraq and threatened to use them against foreign troops who invade Iraqi cities.

The kidnappers, who called themselves the Abu Bakr al-Siddiq Fundamentalist Brigades, said that the woman, who was not identified by name, works with US troops in Iraq.

They also demanded the release of all female prisoners.

Interior Ministry spokesman Colonel Adnan Abdul-Rahman said that the woman was a longtime Iraq resident with Iraqi citizenship and was believed to have been abducted on Wednesday night.

Col Abdul-Rahman did not release her name.

Al-Jazeera said that the woman had called on Polish troops to leave the country and for US and Iraqi authorities to release all female detainees from the Abu Ghraib prison.

Defence Minister Jerzy Szmajdzinski vowed that the Polish government would not give in to the kidnappers' demands.

"The Polish government will not deal with fulfilling the demands of the abductors," he said.

Poland commands 6,000 troops from 15 nations - including 2,400 from Poland - in the Babil, Karbala and Wasit provinces.

A separate armed group calling itself Al-Islam's Army Brigades, Al-Karar Brigade, said yesterday that it had co-ordinated with officers and soldiers of "the American intelligence" to obtain a "huge amount of the explosives that were in the al-Qaqaa facility."

The claim could not be independently verified.

"We promise God and the Iraqi people that we will use it against the occupation forces and those who co-operate with them in the event of these forces threatening any Iraqi city," the man added.

A car bomb exploded yesterday in southern Baghdad, killing one US soldier and at least one Iraqi civilian.

Elsewhere, Iraqi citizens expressed outrage at the graffiti that US troops stationed near the ancient city of Babylon have been daubing on its walls.

Carrying automatic weapons, US soldiers and their foreign allies strut through the world-famous cradle of civilisation, now within the walls of a military base run by Polish soldiers 50 miles south of Baghdad.

"Americans and Polish, out!" a man at the site said in English. "Babylon is 4,000, 5,000 years old. It's for all civilisations, not Americans. They must go."