Five Britons kidnapped in Iraq
Pastor Dale Morgan
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Wednesday May 30, 1:16 AM
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Five Britons kidnapped in Iraq*
Gunmen in Iraqi police uniforms kidnapped five Britons -- a computer
expert and his four bodyguards -- from a finance ministry building in
Baghdad on Tuesday, officials said.
The daylight raid came as the US military confirmed ten GIs were killed
on Monday, as the United States marked its annual Memorial Day for
fallen troops, making May the deadliest month for American forces this year.
The British government said five British nationals had been kidnapped,
while the Canadian security firm Garda World confirmed that the captives
were four Britons employed as a security detail and their client.
"We can confirm that a group of five British nationals were abducted in
an incident at the finance ministry in central Baghdad," said a British
foreign ministry spokeswoman, adding that the attack happened at 11:40
am local time.
"Officials from our embassy are in urgent contact with the Iraqi
authorities to try to establish the facts and to secure a swift
resolution," she said.
The men were snatched when police vehicles surrounded a finance ministry
office on Palestine Street in the heart of Baghdad and a squad of men
wearing police uniforms stormed the building, an Iraqi official said.
The four were taken away at gunpoint and driven off by men in the
recently issued newly designed fatigues of the National Police, a
heavily armed interior ministry paramilitary unit, he added.
Western security contractors in Baghdad described the hostages as a
foreign contractor training Iraqi finance ministry employees computer
skills and his four man security details.
Iraqi officials said German nationals had also been taken, but German
Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier could not confirm this.
"The German embassy and other authorities in Germany immediately
followed up the reports that German citizens had been kidnapped," he
said. "At this point in time, the reports have not been confirmed and I
hope it stays that way."
In 2006, Baghdad suffered a rash of kidnappings by large numbers of men
in military-style uniforms, particularly those of the national police.
The units were then issued with new uniforms to distinguish them from
criminals.
International contractors are frequent targets of insurgent and criminal
gangs in Iraq. Some have been released unharmed -- including at least
three Germans -- but others have been murdered by their captors.
Meanwhile, 33 people were killed in two bomb attacks in Baghdad.
The Iraqi capital is in the grip of a bombing campaign by insurgents
bent on fomenting sectarian violence between the city's rival Sunni and
Shiite factions and on undermining a 14-week-old US and Iraqi security plan.
A car bomb exploded outside a Shiite prayer hall in southwestern
Baghdad, killing 21 people and wounding 53, according to medical officials.
Survivors told Yarmuk hospital medics the car exploded outside the
al-Imma Husseiniya, a Shiite prayer hall in the mixed neighbourhood of Amil.
The blast came less than an hour after a suicide car bomb exploded in a
busy Baghdad square near a police patrol, killing at least 12 people in
the crowded Tayaran Square, hospital officials said.
Meanwhile, the US military said six soldiers were killed and three more
were wounded in a bomb attack on their convoy in Diyala province on Monday.
Two more soldiers died when an army helicopter crashed in the province,
a rural region north of Baghdad where an increasingly vicious insurgency
has claimed large numbers of US soldiers.
A further two soldiers were killed in Baghdad by a roadside bomb.
At least 113 American servicemen have died so far in May, making it the
bloodiest of the year so far for the US military, and one of the worst
since the US-led invasion of March 2003.
The latest casualties bring the American toll since the war began to
3,465, according to an AFP count based on Pentagon figures.