Iraqi and US forces search for abducted Britons

Hundreds of Iraqi and US troops cordoned off sections of Baghdad’s Sadr City slum early today for a series of raids in an effort to find five Britons abducted from a nearby government building.

British Embassy officials held ongoing talks today with Iraqi officials to discuss the situation, Britain’s Foreign Office said. Britain’s COBRA crisis committee was also to meet for the second day.

Four of yesterday’s kidnap victims are security professionals working for the firm GardaWorld. The fifth is an expert who was working for the US management consultancy firm BearingPoint.

The five men were pulled out of a Finance Ministry office by about 40 heavily armed men in police uniforms yesterday 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.”

Residents of Sadr City said hundreds of American and Iraqi troops sealed off areas of the Shiite neighbourhood overnight and carried out a series of arrest raids that lasted until dawn.

The US military said in a statement today that it had arrested five suspected militants and one suspected leader of a militant cell during early morning raids in Sadr City. Those arrested were believed part of a cell that smuggled weapons in from Iran and sent militants to Iran for training, the statement said. The statement did not link the raid to the missing men.