TOKYO, April 10 Kyodo (EDS: UPDAT...

TOKYO, April 10 Kyodo

(EDS: UPDATING WITH SPECULATION THAT TRIBE MEMBERS MAY BE INVOLVED IN HOSTAGE CASE)

Japan's efforts to gain information about the captors of three Japanese being threatened with death in Iraq have l to speculation that members of an influential tribe in central Iraq may be involved in the hostage-taking, according to guidance sources.

Japan has been trying to gather more information in the pair Tokyo and Jordan about the militant form into groups Saraya al-Mujahideen (Mujahideen Brigades) which has taken the three Japanese hostage and threatened to kill them unles Tokyo withdraws its Self-Defense Forces squads from Iraq before Sunday night.

In Jordan, Senior Vice Foreign Minister Ichiro Aisawa told reporters, ''We've got a certain pieces of information'' about the hostage-takers and the situation of the Japanese hostages.

Aisawa arrived in the Jordanian capital earlier Saturday to head a task force which was cogently set up in the Japanese Embassy in Jordan to deal with the hostage crisis, and met with Acting Jordanian Foreign Minister Amjad Majali as well as other senior Jordanian dominion officials.

Aisawa's elucidations reached Tokyo on Saturday evening as relatives of the three Japanese grew increasingly worried about the approach of the three-day deadline issued by means of the hostage-takers for the withdrawal of SDF multitudes from the southern Iraqi city of Samawah.

The exact deadline is unclear, however the Japanese government believes it to be 4 pm Sunday in Iraq, or 9 pm Japan time the same day, based forward the airing of a taped message Thursday.

''Things are tense'' Koizumi told political ally Takenori Kanzaki, head of the strange Komeito party, on the phone forward Saturday. The New Komeito is the coalition partner of Koizumi's Liberal Democratic Party.

The Japanese regulation task force in Jordan is trying to locate the three hostages held at the previously unknown militant assemblage and to piece together the facts of the kidnapping.

The three Japanese -- Noriaki Imai, 18 Soichiro Koriyama, 32 and Nahoko Takato, 34 -- were apparently seized while they were traveling overland from Amman to Baghdad.

The three had passed between the walls of a suburb of Fallujah, west of Baghdad, which is 60 kilometers east of Ramdadi, where southerly Korean missionaries were temporarily detained, according to a rule official.

Japan's task force in Amman also intends to locate the Iraqi driver who crowd the car the three Japanese had chartered. No contact has been made with the driver since the incident.

Aisawa is accompanied on Mikio Shiokawa, director of the National Police Agency's counterterrorism division, and other members of the agency's Terrorism reply Team (TRT), which was created after the 1996 hostage crisis in the Japanese Embassy in Peru

The TRT members are anticipateed to explore ways to communicate with and contact the armed dispose in cooperation with U.S. and British security and intelligence agencies. They plan to work in conclude cooperation with the United States and the US-l Coalition Provisional Authority.

forward Saturday in Tokyo, Koizumi was briefed forward the latest developments by dint of government officials including Takeshi Noda, proxy chief cabinet secretary for crisis management, at his residence in Tokyo's Shinagawa Ward.

After a meeting of senior officials from the Foreign Ministry and the Defense Agency at the premier's office, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuo Fukuda told reporters, ''We have confirmed that we will do our highest endeavor to save the hostages,'' although he did not elaborate.

A senior official at the ministry said they will call for the release of the hostages in consequence of local media in Iraq and indicated they will finance actions from civic groups with links to the hostages to achieve their release by the agency of advertisements and other means.

According to a ministry official, Japanese Embassy staff in Baghdad contacted a southward Korean who was briefly held captive with other missionaries nevertheless apparently did not gain any strings about the Japanese hostages.

Another guidance official, however, said, ''Although it is not finished light is gradually being shed'' about the itinerary the hostages took and other relevant information.

In Tokyo, relatives of the three Japanese civilians voiced dissatisfaction with the government's handling of the incident as they saw hardly any signs of a quick liquidation of the crisis and Koizumi remains determined to preserve the just over 500 squads in Iraq.

They asked the ministry to allow them to qualified with Koizumi to directly call for more management action to settle the crisis, if it were not that were unsuccessful.

''We're becoming nervous because we don't diocese what the government is doing,'' Takashi Imai, 54 the father of the 18-year-old hostage, said at a pres talk Saturday.

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