Iraq: Scores of factory workers were seized at gunpoint as they finished their shift at an industrial complex north of Baghdad yesterday in what appeared to be the latest mass kidnapping by insurgents bent on fomenting sectarian strife.
Police sources said up to 85 workers, many of them from Shia areas in northern Baghdad, had been taken to an unknown location by gunmen who had stormed a convoy of buses about to take the employees back to the capital.
They were taken at the Nasr General Complex in Taji, 12 miles north of Baghdad, a predominantly Sunni Arab area with a heavy insurgent presence.
Under the former Baathist regime, the factory was part of a huge state-owned military-industrial complex, but government officials said it now makes school benches and blackboards.
Kamel Muhammad, an engineer working at the plant, told Associated Press he had seen two of the plant's buses and a mini-van intercepted by gunmen in three cars.
Other workers leaving the plant in their own cars were ordered to get into the buses.
The mass abductions of Iraqi civilians are an increasingly favoured tactic on both sides of the Shia-Sunni divide.
Meanwhile, Saddam Hussein's defence team was calling for greater protection last night after the bullet-riddled body of one of his chief lawyers was found dumped on a road in eastern Baghdad.
Khamis al-Obeidi was reportedly lured from his home in the mainly Sunni Arab neighbourhood of Adamiya by insurgents dressed as Iraqi police.
His body, which showed eight bullet wounds and signs of torture, was found an hour later in a Shia district, police sources said.
The militant group that claimed responsibility for killing two abducted US soldiers this week pledged yesterday to also kill four Russian embassy workers it was holding because Moscow had failed to meet a 48-hour deadline to pull its troops out of Chechnya.
The Mujahideen Shura Council, an umbrella grouping dominated by al-Qaeda in Iraq, said in a statement on an Islamist website that it had decided to "implement God's law" by sentencing the four men to death.
The speaker of Iraq's parliament asked the US ambassador yesterday to investigate the killing by US troops of "many innocent people" at a poultry farm in a village northeast of Baghdad.
- (Guardian service; additional reporting: Reuters)