3 Iraqis, 7 GIs killed in Iraq

On Tuesday, two German engineers working at a plant in northern Iraq were abducted Tuesday, police said.

Gunmen in two cars seized the pair, who worked at a detergent plant near an oil refinery in Beiji, about 150 miles north of Baghdad, police Capt. Laith Hamid said.

No further details were available but Hamid said police checkpoints had been set up throughout the area in an effort to find them.

Meanwhile, the US military said seven more US troops had been killed a soldier in a roadside bombing in Baghdad on Monday, two Air Force members in a blast near Taji north of the capital late Sunday, and four soldiers in a roadside bombing near the northern town of Hawijah on Friday.

There was no word on the fate of kidnapped American journalist Jill Carroll. Iraqi officials said joint US-Iraqi operations were carried out recently to free her, but they provided no details.

Also Monday, bodies of eight Sunni Arabs were found in a field north of Baghdad five days after they were seized on their way home by bus after being rejected for admission to the police academy in the capital. Twenty-three bodies of the group were found Sunday, and 35 were believed to have been on the bus. Police are often targeted by insurgents.

The pre-dawn raid in the predominantly Sunni Arab of Toubji threatens to inflame sectarian tensions as leaders of Iraq's religious and ethnic communities prepare for talks on a unity government to include Sunni Arabs, the heart of the insurgency.