Search Continues for Five Britons Abducted From Ministry Building

May 31, 07:39 AM

Current Headlines: By JOHN WARD ANDERSON

By John Ward Anderson and Naseer Nouri

The Washington Post

BAGHDAD - Scores of U.S. troops descended on the vast Shiite district of Sadr City in Baghdad late Tuesday and early Wednesday, residents said, searching several houses in what appeared to be an intense hunt for a British financial consultant and four British bodyguards abducted Tuesday.

The five were taken from a Finance Ministry building on Tuesday by dozens of men dressed in police uniforms as the consultant, who works for the U.S. firm BearingPoint, delivered a lecture under a contract with the U.S. Agency for International Development, a U.S. Embassy official said.

The size and efficiency of the kidnapping force, the ease with which they carried out the operation in a government compound, and the Finance Ministry's proximity to Sadr City, about 1.5 miles away, Iraqi officials said, all pointed to a possible connection to Shiite militias.

The Mahdi Army militia loyal to anti-American cleric Muqtada al- Sadr has its stronghold in Sadr City, but a spokesman for the cleric said the militia was not involved in the kidnapping.

"It has been a known fact for some time that the Interior Ministry police, security units and forces are corrupt, are penetrated," Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zebari told BBC radio Wednesday, saying he suspected the Mahdi Army of involvement in the abductions.

"The number of people who were involved in the operation to seal off the building, to set roadblocks and to get into the building with such confidence must have some connections," he said. "There must be some unholy, unruly militias working beyond the law in that area, with this connection with the local police, to be able to kidnap these people."

Kidnappings of foreigners have been fairly rare in Iraq, but kidnappings of Iraqis are a daily occurrence, as one Wednesday illustrated. Police in Hawijah, about 30 miles southwest of the northern city of Kirkuk, said that 17 farm laborers working at a local Iraqi army base were abducted when their bus stopped at a fake checkpoint set up by gunmen wearing police uniforms.

A U.S. source familiar with the Baghdad abductions, but who was not authorized to speak publicly about them, said it was "the feeling of 99 percent of the people in the embassy" that the Mahdi Army or rogue elements from it were somehow involved in the kidnappings.

Security officials said the incident may be tied to the killing in Basra last week of a top Mahdi Army commander, Wisam Abu Qadir, by a group of Iraqi special forces operating with British military advisers.

U.S. military spokesman Lt. Col. Christopher Garver would not say where U.S. forces were focusing their search for the Britons. He said that investigators were exploring whether the Britons were taken for ransom or for political reasons.

Elsewhere in Iraq, more than 25 people were killed Wednesday in mortar strikes, roadside bombings, suicide attacks and other violence, and the bodies of 25 men - all shot to death, many handcuffed, blindfolded and bearing signs of torture - were found in different parts of the capital, according to an Iraqi Interior Ministry official who was not authorized to speak publicly.

In addition, the killings of three Iraqi journalists were reported Wednesday, bringing to 14 the number of journalists killed in Iraq so far this year, and 107 since the war began in 2003, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists .

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