IRAQ:Urgent attempts were under way last night to free five Britons kidnapped from a government building in Baghdad by gunmen wearing Iraqi police uniforms.
The seized Britons include four security guards working for a private firm and a financial expert who has been advising the Iraqi government.
They were seized just before noon at the finance ministry in what appeared to be a carefully planned assault, involving cars and uniforms intended to give the impression that it was a government-sanctioned operation.
Also yesterday, a bomb on a parked minibus in central Baghdad and a car bomb in a busy market in a southwestern Shia district killed at least 38 people. In addition, the US military said 10 soldiers were killed in Iraq on Monday, taking the total for May to 114, the deadliest month for US troops since November 2004, when 137 soldiers were killed.
According to one witness to yesterday's kidnap, a group of gunmen stormed into a hall where a western adviser was giving a lecture, led by a man in a police major's uniform and shouting: "Where are the foreigners?" The gunmen then rounded up five Britons and left.
In London the UK government's Cobra crisis committee held an emergency meeting to discuss the situation. A foreign office spokeswoman said: "Officials from the British embassy are in urgent contact with the Iraq authorities to try to establish the facts and secure a swift resolution." There was no formal British response while the immediate efforts to secure the captives' release were under way.
Some Iraqi government officials were last night privately blaming the Mahdi army, a Shia militia led by the radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. After months in hiding, he reappeared last week in Najaf calling on Sunni and Shia Iraqis to unite against the US-led occupation. Last Friday, the Mahdi army's commander in Basra, Abu Qader, was killed by British and Iraqi forces.
Brig Gen Abdel-Karim Khalaf, an Iraqi interior ministry spokesman, said the kidnappers were wearing police uniforms and drove up to the finance ministry in 19 four-wheel-drive vehicles of a type used by police. After seizing the Britons, Gen Khalaf said the attackers drove off towards the nearby Sadr City, a Shia stronghold in north-eastern Baghdad.
A British source said that other accounts suggested that there may have been fewer vehicles involved and that at least some of the attackers were dressed in khaki combat gear without official insignia.
Employees at the finance ministry are likely to be questioned on how the kidnappers were able to enter the building, seize the Britons and leave with no apparent resistance. The finance minister, Bayan Jabr, is a conservative Shia politician who has been accused by Sunnis of fomenting sectarian violence. However, he is a senior member of a Shia group that is a rival to the Mahdi army. The incident also calls into question the effectiveness of a joint US-Iraqi security crackdown in Baghdad, widely seen in Washington as a last-ditch attempt to stabilise the Iraqi government.
The missing Britons had not been named last night for their own safety. The security guards were working for GardaWorld, a Canadian firm employing mainly British ex-soldiers. The finance expert was working for BearingPoint, a US management consultancy based in Virginia which won a contract in 2003 to help rebuild the Iraqi financial system.
"We have been informed that a BearingPoint employee working in Iraq was taken from a work site early this morning," Steve Lunceford, a company spokesman, said yesterday. "We are fully co-operating with local and international authorities to ascertain facts surrounding this incident and are supporting efforts to ensure the employee's safe release."
In its scale and daring, the attack resembled a mass abduction in November when militiamen dressed as police stormed a ministry of higher education building, picked out Sunnis and took them away. Almost all were later released. That operation was blamed on Shia militiamen with links to the Mahdi army, who were thought to have had inside help from the Iraqi police.
The constant threat of kidnapping and roadside bombs has left very few civilian westerners still prepared to venture out into the streets of Baghdad, or anywhere else in central Iraq.