ITALY endured a day of anguish and confusion over the fate of two Italian women hostages after an Islamic website claimed early yesterday morning that they had been beheaded “without mercy”.

Simona Torretta and Simona Pari, both aged 29 and members of the Italian aid agency Bridge to Baghdad, had been seized on September 7 from their Baghdad offices, with two Iraqi assistants.

The women have not been heard of since, and the hostage-takers have released no video footage of them. Messages on the internet over the past two weeks have given warning that they would be killed unless the 3,000 Italian troops and police in Iraq were withdrawn.

Both women have devoted their lives to humanitarian work in Iraq.

Huge posters showing the pair wearing Arabic headscarves and appealing for their release have sprung up in all Italian cities, and television news has shown them helping the people of Iraq to rebuild hospitals, schools and libraries.

Iraqis have demonstrated in Baghdad on their behalf, with tearful Iraqi women saying that “the two Simonas” as they are universally known had helped them to obtain medical care and get their children to school.

Simona Torretta, from Rome, had been working in Iraq since 1994 and joined Bridge to Baghdad in 1999. Simona Pari, from Rimini, worked for Save the Children in Afghanistan and the Balkans before joining Bridge to Baghdad in July last year. Both speak Arabic, and both wore Arabic dress.

The women believed their pacifism, opposition to the Iraq war and popularity among ordinary Iraqis would help to protect them. The day before the abduction, however, they expressed their fears over unspecified “warnings”.

Alarm spread through Italy early yesterday when a group calling itself Ansar al-Zawahri (the Supporters of al-Zawahri) posted a message on an Islamic website claiming the two women had been killed.

A later message by an apparently different group, the Islamic Jihad Organisation, said that a video would be released “shortly” showing that the two women had been decapitated. “We announce that God’s verdict has been passed on the two Italian prisoners by slaughtering, after the Italian Government headed by the vile Berlusconi did not listen to our one condition — to withdraw from Iraq,” the message said. It referred to the two women as “spies”, and said they had both been “decapitated with a knife, without sympathy or mercy”.

The message accused Italian troops of committing “bloody massacres” at al-Nasiriyah and referred to Signor Berlusconi’s “humiliating” statement shortly after his election three years ago that Western civilisation was “superior” to Islam.

Yesterday the families of the two women remained behind closed doors, watching television bulletins “24 hours a day”, according to friends. Signora Torretta’s mother Anna Maria said: “I hope it isn’t true, it cannot be true . . . If they have killed them, they have killed the good of the world. We are hanging by a thread of hope.”

The Italian Government cast doubt on the murder claims, saying they were part of “a terrorist campaign conducted through the media” and that the claims had appeared on a little-known website. The Government said it had opened “new channels” to contact the hostage-takers, but did not elaborate.

Enzo Bianco, who heads the parliamentary committee overseeing Italy’s intelligence services, said that Italian intelligence regarded the messages as “unreliable”. Ansa, the Italian press agency, quoted Iraqi police sources as saying there was “reason to believe” the women were still alive.

The news has dominated the Italian media and television producers announced that light entertainment shows would be taken off the air if the deaths were confirmed.

The case is seen as anomalous by Italian anti-terrorism experts, since the “two Simonas” were abducted by about 20 well-armed men acting “with a professionalism more reminiscent of the secret services of the Saddam Hussein regime than the anti-occupation insurgents”, as Corriere della Sera put it. It said the kidnapping appeared intended to convey the message that the militants distinguished neither between coalition forces and foreign humanitarian workers nor between men and women.

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