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| Iraq |
| Dupe entry: Troops Seek Kidnapped Britons |
| 2007-05-30 |
| Hundreds of Iraqi and U.S. troops cordoned off sections of Baghdad's Sadr City slum early Wednesday and conducted a series of raids in an apparent effort to find five British citizens abducted from a nearby government building the day before, local residents and police said. The five men were pulled out of a Finance Ministry office by about 40 heavily armed men in police uniforms in broad daylight Tuesday and driven in a convoy of 19 four-wheel-drive vehicles toward Sadr City, according to the British Foreign office in London and Iraqi officials in the Interior and Finance ministries. A senior Iraqi official said the radical Shiite Mahdi Army militia was suspected in the attack. Soon after the abduction, Iraqi forces established a special battalion of Iraqi soldiers and police officers to search for the men, said Brig. Gen. Qassim al Musawi, an Iraqi army spokesman. "We are conducting search operations near the site where the abduction took place," he said Wednesday. "Maybe today or in the coming few days, we will find them with the help of secret intelligence." That would be as opposed to American CIA/New York Times intelligence. Hours after the kidnappings, Joe Gavaghan, a spokesman for Montreal-based security firm GardaWorld, confirmed that four of its security workers and one client were kidnapped. All four GardaWorld workers are British citizens, he said, declining to provide more details. A spokesman for BearingPoint, a McLean, Virginia-based management consulting firm, said one of the company's employees, apparently the client referred to by Gavaghan, was among those abducted. The kidnappings, if the work of the Mahdi Army as asserted by several Iraqi officials, could be retaliation for the killing by British forces last week of the militia's commander in Basra. Canon Andrew White, the Anglican vicar of Baghdad, who lives in the GardaWorld compound and is involved in efforts to free the men, said it's "a strong possibility" the kidnapping was a retaliation for the killing. "We have been in contact with (the Mahdi Army) and are doing our best to try and continue that contact throughout the day," he told BBC radio. The raid was reminiscent of an attack by the Shiite militiamen, dressed as Interior Ministry commandos, who stormed a Higher Education Ministry office Nov. 14 and snatched away as many as 200 people. Dozens of those kidnap victims have never been found. "We are pursuing this case very vigorously, first to release them, secondly to establish the truth of what happened, who was responsible," Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari told BBC radio on Wednesday. Zebari said that the government has long believed that its security forces were infiltrated by militia members. "The number of people who were involved in the operation - to seal off the building, to set roadblocks, to get into the building with such confidence - (means they) must have some connection," he said. Or a lot of iranian training. |
| Posted by:Bobby |
| #1 Interesting timeline. Sadr goes to Iran for 4 months, comes back and bang - 5 Brits are nabbed by faux policemen. Bet those uniforms have never been to the cleaners since the last time they used them. I still wonder why Petraeus doesn't make an accident out of Sadr. |
| Posted by: Jack is Back! 2007-05-30 11:28 |