Elsewhere, the bodies of two slain Turkish citizens and an unidentified man were discovered in northern Iraq, a police official said yesterday, while Al-Jazeera broadcast part of a video by a militant group purportedly showing the killing of three Turkish hostages.

Al-Jazeera said it received a statement along with the video claiming the killings from Tawhid and Jihad, a group associated with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian militant believed linked to al-Qaeda and held responsible for a string of bombings, kidnappings and other attacks in Iraq. It could not immediately be confirmed whether the bodies found in Iraq belonged to the men in the video.

French envoys also fanned out for crisis talks yesterday in Iraq and Jordan in a desperate bid to free two journalists seized by militants seeking to overturn France's law banning Islamic head scarves in public schools.

Meanwhile, the car of the Czech ambassador to Iraq, Martin Klepetko, has come under fire in Baghdad but no one was hurt in the incident, the Prague newspaper Pravo said, citing the diplomat in Prague.

Questioned by AFP, the foreign ministry would not immediately confirm the shooting which happened Wednesday.

Klepetko's reinforced car which does not carry any signs hinting at its status was hit by about 30 bullets, said Klepetko. At the time of the incident only two Czech police officers were inside.

Klepetko said the two men were stopped at a roadblock by a group of armed men in the residential Al-Mansur neighborhood, not far from the ambassador's residence. Another group then immediately opened fire.

Militants waging a violent 16-month insurgency in Iraq have increasingly turned to kidnapping foreigners as part of an effort to drive out coalition forces and contractors. Other groups have taken hostages in hopes of extorting ransom.

The US military said it had carried out a precision strike late Wednesday on a safehouse in Fallujah, 40 miles west of Baghdad, used by followers al-Zarqawi. Witnesses said the strike hit a residential house in the southern neighborhood of al-Jubail.

Dr. Ahmed Hamid of Fallujah General Hospital said the bodies of nine civilians, including three children, had been brought to the hospital. An Associated Press reporter saw eight more bodies pulled from the rubble.

"There is only one God, Allah!" crowds chanted at the hospital, where the bombing casualties were brought before dawn Thursday. A blanket filled with body parts could be seen lying on the ground, while relatives loaded corpses into the back of a pickup truck for burial.

"It is because of the Americans," one man shouted.

US forces repeatedly have carried out airstrikes in Fallujah since Marines pulled back after a three-week siege of the city in April aimed at rooting out Sunni Muslim insurgents.

The three bodies found by a police patrol at a rural farm five miles from the northern city of Samarra late Wednesday were taken to a city hospital for an autopsy, police Maj. Sadoun Ahmed Matrud said.

Matrud said police found identification on two of the bodies that showed they were Majeed Mohammed and Yahya Qadir of Turkey, but nothing was found to identify the third body. It was not clear when the three were killed, nor what they were doing in Iraq, Matrud said.

The Turkish Foreign Ministry and the Turkish Embassy in Baghdad said they had no information.

Al-Jazeera broadcast part of the video, but not the footage showing the purported killings of the three Turkish hostages. The pan-Arab station did not say how the three were killed, nor did it identify them and The brief segment broadcast showed three men sitting on the floor with three masked men, two of them armed, standing behind them. The unarmed masked man was reading a statement.

"The time of forgiveness has gone. You have nothing left but killing and beheading," said the brief printed Arabic statement, which Al-Jazeera showed on its screen.

A group of French Muslims was in Baghdad to try to pursue negotiations with the militant group holding the journalists. Representatives of the French Council for the Muslim Faith, which serves as a link to President Jacques Chirac's government, left Paris on Wednesday in hopes of retrieving the journalists.

In other violence, two people were killed yesterday in a roadside bomb explosion about 45 miles southwest of the northern city of Kirkuk, police Col. Sarhat Qadir said.

US forces also detained the mayor of Qaim, near the Syrian border, along with some two dozen councilmen during a raid on City Hall offices, said police Capt. Ahmed al-Ugaili.

The US military did not immediately comment on the raid.

Also Thursday, about 100 Iraq policemen protested in front of the governor's office in the northern city of Mosul, saying they had not received their salaries in five months.

Dressed in civilian clothes, some of the demonstrators sat on the street in front of the building. Others asked that the police chief resign.

"Where is our government? We want our salaries," they chanted. (AP/AFP)