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BAGHDAD - Gunmen in Iraqi army uniforms kidnapped a senior Iranian diplomat in Baghdad, Iraqi and Iranian officials said today, and Tehran blamed the US military and demanded his immediate release.
"We are dealing with this as a kidnapping," an Iraqi government official said of the incident, which threatens to further raise tensions between the United States and Iran.
The official said the diplomat, the second secretary at the Iranian embassy in Baghdad, was snatched in the central Karrada district on Sunday by 30 gunmen wearing the uniforms of a special Iraqi army unit that often works with US military forces in Iraq.
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini blamed US forces for the kidnapping of Jalal Sharafi, saying it was carried out by a group attached to Iraq's Defence Ministry "which works under the supervision of American forces".
The ministry said it had summoned the Swiss and Iraqi ambassadors to Iran to protest against the abduction. The Swiss embassy handles US affairs in Iran, which has no diplomatic relations with its arch-foe Washington.
US forces in Iraq have arrested a number of Iranians, including diplomats, in the past two months, and are still holding five Iranians. Washington accuses Tehran of aiding militants fighting US forces in Iraq and US President George W. Bush has vowed to disrupt such support.
"It seems that this terrorist act has been committed in the framework of Bush's order and with the goal of escalating the confrontation with Iran," Iran's ambassador to Iraq, Hassan Kazemi-Qomi, was quoted by Iranian state television as saying.
Iraq's Foreign Minister Hoshiar Zebari said that the government was investigating the kidnapping, which he described as a "weird incident". He told Reuters that the Americans denied any involvement in the matter.
"We have contacted directly the relevant sides and they denied any relation to this," he said.
A US military spokesman also denied that US forces had played a role in the incident, which comes amid tensions between the United States and Iran over Tehran's nuclear programme.
"We are not aware of any mission that even resembles this incident," a US military spokesman in Baghdad, Lieutenant- Colonel Christopher Garver, said.
The Iraqi government has been critical of recent raids by American forces in which Iranians working with diplomatic offices in Iraq have been detained. It has voiced concern that such arrests could turn Iraq into a battleground for the settling of scores between Iran and the United States.
Hosseini said Sharafi was kidnapped outside a building that will house a branch of an Iranian bank in Baghdad. The Iraqi official said the gunmen drove in four-wheel-drive vehicles and a BMW and were wearing uniforms of the Iraqi 36th Commando Battalion, a special operations unit that works with US forces.
The official said that police close to the scene opened fire on the gunmen and arrested six of them. Later, another security force came to the police station and said they were taking the six to the Serious Crimes building in Baghdad but the police discovered later that they never arrived there.
Non-Arab, Shi'ite Iran resumed diplomatic relations with Iraq following the ouster of Saddam Hussein and the empowerment of Iraq's Shi'ite majority after U.S.-sponsored elections.
Tehran denies US charges it is backing militants in Iraq and blames US troops for the violence and for inflaming tensions between Iraq's majority Shi'ite and once dominant Sunni Arabs.
- REUTERS
