Australian hostage rescued by US-Iraqi troops

US and Iraqi forces rescued an Australian hostage in Baghdad while the death toll continued to rise across the country with suicide bombers killing 26 soldiers and eight policemen.

Douglas Wood, a 64-year-old engineer, had been held for 47 days in Ghazaliyah, a western suburb of the capital. His kidnappers had demanded that the Australian government withdraw its 1,400 troops from Iraq and pay a substantial ransom.

In the latest attacks an insurgent in an army uniform walked into a mess hall in Diyala province and blew himself up, killing 26 soldiers and injuring 26 others. In eastern Baghdad, a car bomber slammed into a police convoy, killing eight policemen in two vehicles.

Mr Wood, a long time resident of California, and married to an American, said he was " extremely happy and relieved to be free again". The engineer, seized by a group calling itself the Shura Council of the Mujahedin was the first national from Australia to be abducted in Iraq.

The Iraqi military said the rescue yesterday was led by "specific intelligence". General Naseer al-Abadi, deputy chief of defence staff, said the Australian was found under a blanket. Three men arrested at the house had claimed he was their "sick father".

John Howard, the Australian Premier, said in Canberra: "It hasn't happened very often that somebody has been rescued in this fashion. Sadly, the fate of others has been different and far dimmer and we are therefore delighted and overjoyed at the outcome."

Nick Warner, Australia's head of counterterrorism, said no ransom had been paid "despite a request for a very large amount".

Mr Wood was videotaped by his captors pleading with the Australian government to save his life by withdrawing their troops. His family had launched an English and Arabic website to press for his release, given interviews to Arabic television stations and enlisted the help of senior Muslim clerics in Australia.

The suicide bombing at Khalis, 70 miles north-east of Baghdad, bore striking similarities to an attack on Tuesday in the northern city of Kirkuk where a suicide bomber killed 23 people and injured nearly 100 others outside a bank in a queue of pensioners, many of them former government employees. Ansar al-Sunnah, a fundamentalist group allegedly linked to al-Qa'ida, claimed responsibility and vowed further acts.

In yesterday's attack the bomber, dressed as a soldier, managed to slip past supposedly heightened security. The Iraqi defence ministry said there had been serious infiltration of the armed forces by insurgents.

Two former members of the army accused of playing a part in placing resistance members in the forces were arrested yesterday, reportedly planting a roadside bomb. The Iraqi government identified them as Major-General Abid Dawood Salman and his son, Captain Raidh Abid Dawood and claimed they were also close to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born militant leader of the al-Qa'ida group in Iraq.

Faced with with 1,051 deaths in less than two months, an Iraqi parliamentary committee offered more power- sharing to the minority Sunni community which supplies most of the insurgents. But the offer was immediately rejected by Sunni religious leaders and the community's biggest political party as inadequate.

The Shia-dominated parliamentary committee drafting Iraq's new constitution offered the Sunni Arab minority a bigger say in drawing up the charter. After a meeting of the 55-member body, committee chairman Hummam Hammoudi suggested that 13 Sunni Arabs join the committee in a parallel body.

That 68-member body would make decisions by consensus and pass them on to the 55 lawmakers for ratification, he said. An additional 10 Sunni Arabs would also join, but only in an advisory capacity.