A car bomb exploded outside a restaurant in a busy commercial area of Baghdad Wednesday, killing at least five people and wounding 56, police said. 

The blast destroyed several stores and sent thick black smoke spiraling into the sky. Shards of glass and debris littered the street in western Baghdad.

US soldiers riding armored vehicles cordoned off the area and firefighters doused water on burning cars. At least 10 cars were destroyed, one of them flipped upside down.

"I was just standing here talking and then I heard two huge explosions," said Humam Abdul-Hadi, who owns an electrical goods store near the bomb site. He said an ice cream restaurant had taken the brunt of the blast.

"I don't even know who they were targeting," said Abdul-Hadi, who had shrapnel wounds to the face and neck and blood splattered on his T-shirt. "They just bombed people eating ice cream."

Militants in Iraq said they had beheaded a second American hostage and would kill a Briton unless Iraqi women were freed from jail.

The renewed threat came as a senior Iraqi justice official said the case of at least one of two Iraqi women in US detention was being reviewed and she could be released.

But, the US Embassy in Baghdad said yesterday that two Iraqi female prisoners being held by US authorities in Iraq will not be released right away.

"The two women are in legal and physical custody of the multinational forces in Iraq and neither will be released imminently," a spokesman for the US Embassy said.

The militants, led by al-Qaeda ally Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Washington's number one enemy in Iraq, said in an Internet statement they had killed American Jack Hensley because their demands had not been met.

The killing of Hensley came 24 hours after compatriot Eugene Armstrong was killed, his head sawn off by a black-clad, balaclava-wearing militant using a long knife.

"The British hostage will meet the same fate if the British Government does not do what must be done to release him," the statement from Zarqawi's group said.

Meanwhile, the spiritual mentor of Zarqawi, a Muslim cleric who justified Zarqawi's beheading of hostages in Iraq, has been killed in a US air strike, associates and relatives said yesterday.

They said Omar Youssef Jumah, known as Abu Annas al-Shami, whose religious edicts or fatwas were heeded by his fellow Jordanian, died on Friday while hiding to the west of Baghdad.

The report could not be independently confirmed.

Shami called himself grand mufti, or spiritual guide, of Zarqawi's Tawhid and Jihad group.

His wife in the Jordanian capital Amman was contacted on Sunday by Iraqi friends to tell her of Shami's death in an overnight air raid, a family member said.

Shami and several comrades were being sheltered by local people from the Zouba tribe, from which anti-American insurgents draw support, close to Baghdad's main prison at Abu Ghraib, on the highway to the Sunni Muslim stronghold of Falluja.

US aircraft have bombed buildings from Baghdad to Falluja in recent weeks in strikes aimed at Zarqawi's group, which has claimed responsibility for some of the worst violence in Iraq.

(China Daily September 23, 2004)