BAGHDAD, Iraq (AFP) – US forces said yesterday they killed 75 rebels in a sweep near the Syrian border for Iraq’s most wanted man, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, as the foreign hostage crisis deepened with the abduction of a Japanese security contractor.

Al-Qaeda-linked group Ansar al-Sunna released identity card copies giving the hostage’s name as Akihiko Saito, 44, and said he had been captured during a “fierce battle” in western Iraq.

Japanese Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura confirmed that a Japanese employee of a foreign security firm had been kidnapped, Kyodo News reported, while a Cypriot security firm confirmed Saito was on its payroll.

The statement said that Saito was captured during an ambush of a convoy leaving a US base west of Baghdad during which several other foreigners were killed and Saito seriously wounded.

“When the American helicopters arrived, the mujahedeen captured and killed (their hostages), except for one of them, a Japanese, currently detained by the mujahedeen but whose wounds are serious.

“We will publish photographs of those who were killed,” it said.

Ansar al-Sunna has carried out murders of foreign hostages in the past, often releasing video footage of the killings on Islamist websites.

The US military said a joint air and ground operation had been launched in western Iraq to eliminate “terrorists and foreign fighters” from an area “known as a smuggling route and sanctuary for foreign fighters”, north of the Euphrates River.

The commander of US forces in the Gulf, General John Abizaid, earlier this month accused Syria of ignoring US demands to stop foreign fighters crossing the border into Iraq.

Amid the violence, Iraq’s new government held its second meeting, a day after parliament approved the nomination of new ministers for the key portfolios of oil and defence.

The whole cabinet was sworn in a second time after Kurdish leaders complained that the text of the oath read by ministers last week had been stripped of a crucial reference to a “federal Iraq”, as sought by the Kurds.