KEY POINTS:
SAFWAN, Iraq - British and US forces mounted raids in southern Iraq on Friday in the hunt for four Americans and an Austrian kidnapped when the civilian convoy they were guarding was hijacked, Iraqi security sources said.
British troops cordoned off an area of the city of Basra on Friday in what the Iraqi sources told Reuters was a raid based on suspicion the five missing men were held there. A spokesman for the British forces policing the region declined all comment.
From the nearby town of Zubayr, a policeman said US troops had raided the police station there, apparently seeking the hostages. British and US officials have often accused police of working in league with militants hostile to foreign forces.
Police in the border town of Safwan, 60 km south of Basra, showed reporters an armoured four-wheel drive vehicle they said the foreigners were driving in when the truck convoy was brought to a halt by gunmen on Thursday after crossing the border from Kuwait on its way to the city of Nassiriya.
Nine Iraqis were also abducted by the gunmen but at least some had already been released, a security source said. Their Kuwaiti employer said only the foreigners were still missing.
A representative of the Crescent Security Group in Kuwait said: "We don't know exactly what happened." The incident had occurred around noon, between Safwan and Zubayr.
Iraq's Shi'ite majority dominates the oil-rich Basra area but Zubayr is a stronghold of the Sunni Arab minority.
The family of one American security contractor told a US newspaper that US officials said he had been captured after an exchange of fire in which there were no reports of casualties.
The convoy was using a road used by US military convoys on the occupation force's main supply route into Iraq, police said.
Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Garver, a US spokesman in Baghdad, said the military was still checking reports that the convoy might have been stopped at a bogus security checkpoint.
The brother of American Paul Reuben told a newspaper the State Department called the family to say he had been seized.
There has been friction between private security firms, which employ tens of thousands of foreigners in Iraq, and the growing Iraqi security forces. Earlier this week, police in Nassiriya said they had detained four foreign civilians working for a British company after they fired on a police checkpoint.
Foreigners abducted in the Shi'ite south have generally been released, unlike those seized further north where Sunni al Qaeda-linked insurgents have killed dozens of hostages.
However, anger at the US-led occupation has grown among powerful Shi'ite groups, and attacks on British forces and private convoys bringing in supplies from Kuwait have increased.
Jennifer Reuben told the Minneapolis Star Tribune that her brother-in-law told her he was leaving Iraq because of safety fears: "They hate us here," she quoted Paul Reuben as saying.
"They look you in the eye and say, 'Go home, Americans.'"
The incident comes at a time of heightened sectarian tension in Baghdad, not just on the streets but within the government and among groups engaged in the US-backed political process.
Iraq's most prominent Sunni cleric, Harith al-Dari of the Muslim Clerics Association, blasted an arrest warrant issued for him on suspicion of "terrorism" as an attempt by the Shi'ite-led coalition government to divert attention from its own "crimes".
Sunni leaders like Dari, who is safe from arrest in neighbouring Jordan, complain that Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is not doing enough to rein in militias loyal to his Shi'ite allies and which were blamed for a mass kidnapping of dozens of staff from a Sunni-run government ministry on Tuesday.
Cabinet members are still at odds over whether up to 70 people are still missing and whether some were tortured and killed. In what one police source described as a possible reprisal, dozens of Shi'ite bus passengers were missing after suspected Sunni militants set up fake checkpoints in Baghdad.
- REUTERS
