Americans shot dead by bogus policemen

Attackers masquerading as Iraqi policemen killed two American civilians working for the US-led occupation force and their Iraqi interpreter, Poland's defence ministry said today.

The three were shot dead late yesterday on a road between the towns of Kerbala and Hilla in southern Iraq after the men dressed as policemen stopped their car at a makeshift checkpoint.

Polish troops serving under the American-led coalition later arrested five men in the car and found the victims' bodies in its boot, the Polish defence minister Jerzy Szmajdzinski said.

"It was practically an execution carried out by people pretending to be Iraqi policemen," he added.

Abul Abbas, the Palestinian mastermind of the hijacking of the Achille Lauro passenger ship, has died "apparently of natural causes" in US custody in Iraq. He was 56.

Abbas's Palestine Liberation Front commandeered the Italian cruise ship in 1985, demanded that Israel release 50 Palestinian prisoners and then shot, and threw overboard, an elderly Jewish American tourist.