Shosei Koda

Baghdad, Oct. 31 (Reuters): Japan today denounced the beheading of a Japanese hostage in Iraq after a day that saw the heaviest US casualties for six months and the bloodiest attack on a media organisation since the start of the war.

Nine US marines were killed yesterday and a bomb attack on an Arab television station claimed seven lives in Baghdad.

Japanese officials confirmed a body and head found in the Iraqi capital were those of Shosei Koda, 24, a backpacker thought to have taken a bus to Iraq from Jordan last week.

An Iraqi interior ministry spokesperson said the body, with its feet bound, had been wrapped in an American flag.

Television footage showed Koda?s corpse in a white, blood-soaked shirt and his severed head with a thin beard.

?I once again feel anger at this cruel and inhuman act,? said Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, a close ally of US President George W. Bush.

He said Japan?s 500 non-combat troops would stay in Iraq despite the killing.

Militants led by al Qaida-ally Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, America?s top enemy in Iraq, had threatened on Tuesday to behead Koda within 48 hours unless Japanese troops went home.

Iraqi police found the body in the restive Haifa street area of central Baghdad where insurgents are active. Four other Japanese ? two diplomats and two journalists ? have been killed in Iraq since the start of the US-led war.

US artillery shelled Iraq?s rebel city of Falluja today and the military said an air strike the previous day had destroyed a mortar bunker used by insurgents.

A Reuters reporter said the shelling began at 0530 GMT. It was not immediately clear what the gunners were targeting in the latest of near-daily bombardments of the city.

US marines have said they are getting set for a major offensive to drive guerrillas from their strongholds in Falluja and Ramadi, another Sunni city west of Baghdad.

The aim is to crush an estimated 2,000 guerrillas and foreign militants in Falluja to enable Iraq?s interim government to hold national elections in January.

Interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi met a group of Sunni clerics in a last-ditch appeal for a peaceful solution. The clerics, too frightened to be named publicly, said they would respond in a few days, a statement from Allawi?s office said.

The military said the combat death toll suffered by marines in Anbar province west of Baghdad yesterday had risen to nine. Another nine marines were wounded in action.

Seven people were killed and 19 wounded by a car bomb outside the Baghdad office of Dubai-based Al Arabiya satellite television. It was the deadliest attack on the media since the US-led war to topple Saddam Hussein began in March, 2003.