WASHINGTON, March 11, 2006 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) - The leading US Muslim civil liberties group denounced on Saturday, March 11, the killing of an American Christian peace activist who had been taken hostage in Iraq.

"There can be no excuse or justification for harming a person whose only goal was to serve the cause of peace and justice for people of all faiths," Nihad Awad, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), said in a statement posted on the group's Web site.

The body of Tom Fox, a 54-year-old peace activist from Virginia, was found in a plastic bag on a garbage dump in west Baghdad.

The 54-year-old activist had been handcuffed and shot. His tracksuited body had then been wrapped in a blanket and stuffed in a plastic bag.

The US Muslim group offered its condolences to the family of Fox.

"We offer the American Muslim community’s sincere condolences to the family and loved ones of Tom Fox, and call for the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages in Iraq," said Awad.

Fox's three colleagues from the Chicago-based Christian Peacemaker Teams, a group that dispatches volunteers to crisis areas in a bid to reduce armed conflict, appeared Tuesday in a video broadcast by Al-Jazeera television. Fox was not with them.

Their November 26 abduction was claimed by a group calling itself the Brigades of the Swords of Righteousness which threatened to kill them unless all Iraqi prisoners were released.

In December of last year, CAIR held an interfaith news conference in Washington to call for the release of the Christian Peacemakers Teams workers.

Muslim scholars and activists from around the world, including Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, and the leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah, had appealed for the release of the Christian hostages.

Iraqi police found the peace activist in a vacant lot in the upscale Al-Mansur district at around 5 pm (1400 GMT) on Thursday, reported Agence France-Presse (AFP).

Seeing he was a Westerner, the patrol immediately contacted US forces who took charge of the body.

The US State Department said earlier that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had confirmed that the body was that of Fox.

"The FBI verified the identity of a body found in Iraq this morning," spokesman Noel Clay told reporters in Washington.

US embassy spokeswoman Elizabeth Colton said the body was being flown back home.

At least 430 foreigners are known to have been taken hostage in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, a US diplomat said in Baghdad.

They include 41 US nationals, some of them Iraqi-Americans. Fourteen of those remain hostage after Fox's death, the diplomat added.

With the third anniversary of the March 20, 2003 invasion looming, the Bush administration said it plans a new campaign to convince the increasingly skeptical US public that the Iraq campaign has been worth the more than 2,300 US dead.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Bush would give three speeches on Iraq starting next Monday.