BAGHDAD - Alert guards gunned down a black-clad woman at a police recruiting station Tuesday, a would-be suicide bomber who then exploded before their eyes. But another bomber succeeded, detonating an explosives-laden car at a checkpoint in Ramadi and killing six policemen.

Civilians walks behind a crater on Tuesday, June 5, 2007, after a roadside bomb exploded on Monday targeting a British patrol in Al-Baradhaya district, central Basra , Iraq's second-largest city, 550 kilometers (340 miles) southeast of Baghdad. There was no reports about casualties a source in Basra police said. [AP]

The US commander here acknowledged sectarian violence was on the rise.

Meanwhile, the US command insisted it would continue the search for two abducted US soldiers despite the release of a video Monday by insurgents linked to al-Qaida claiming they had killed the two, along with a third missing soldier whose body was found previously.

The command's attitude was reflected in the field.

"It really doesn't change a thing," said Capt. Aaron Bright, a 10th Mountain Division company commander whose men have spent many days on the search since the soldiers were seized in an ambush south of Baghdad on May 12. Four other American soldiers and an Iraqi were killed in that attack.

"We're still going to continue our search and we're never going to stop until they're found. We'll continue to assume they're alive," Bright said in an e-mail to The Associated Press.

The insurgent video displayed the two missing soldiers' identification cards. "The Americans sent 4,000 soldiers looking for them," an unidentified voice said. "They were alive and then dead." It offered no proof.

Among the attacks Tuesday, gunmen assassinated a local leader of Muqtada al-Sadr's radical Shiite Muslim faction south of Baghdad, and to the north insurgents ambushed an Iraqi army vehicle, killing an undetermined number of soldiers.

As the sun rose, reports also began filtering in of headless corpses and other bodies found dumped around Iraq, many presumed victims of the relentless Shiite-against-Sunni bloodshed.

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