Foreigner killed, two freed after Iraq hijack
Source: Reuters
(Adds U.S. State Department) By Aref Mohammed SAFWAN, Iraq, Nov 17 (Reuters) - Iraqi police freed two Americans but a third Westerner was found dead, a local Iraqi official said on Friday, a day after five security guards were kidnapped at a bogus security checkpoint. It was unclear if the dead man was one of the four Americans or an Austrian former soldier seized while escorting a truck convoy that was hijacked near the Kuwaiti border, said the official who works for the governor of Basra province. Arab media quoted police as saying the Austrian was dead. In Washington, the U.S. State Department said it could not confirm that two of the kidnapped Americans had been freed. "We do not have any information that two of them have been freed. The information I have is that we have four people out there who we are looking for," said State Department spokesman Gonzalo Gallegos. He said the four Americans were working for a U.S. security company called Crescent Security Group when their supply convoy was stopped at what appeared to be a police checkpoint. After the operation near the border town of Safwan, the hunt was continuing in the nearby Dewajin district for the two missing men, a police source said. In an apparently unrelated incident in the town of Zubayr earlier on Friday, the British military said a British private security guard was wounded in a clash with Iraqi police. Police said two policemen and another Westerner were killed in that incident at Zubayr, a mainly Sunni enclave in Iraq's heavily Shi'ite south. Zubayr also has administrative control of Safwan and Dewajin, leading to confusion about the two events. British spokesman Captain Tane Dunlop said British troops killed two gunmen in a raid near Safwan although that was not related to the hunt for the five foreigners. He declined to comment on Iraqi security sources' comments that British and U.S. forces were also hunting the hostages. The men were seized, along with nine Asian drivers who were quickly released, when 43 trucks and six security vehicles were halted near Safwan by men in police uniform, officials said. The attack was the latest of several incidents this week in which gunmen in uniform have taken hostages. Iraq is teetering on the brink of civil war and there are grave doubts among the government's U.S. and British backers about the infiltration of security forces by sectarian militias and criminal gangs. Forging credible Iraqi forces and a political consensus are key goals for U.S. President George W. Bush. He faces mounting domestic pressure to start pulling out U.S. troops, although U.S. generals say that could tip Iraq into all-out anarchy, with international militants like al Qaeda finding a base there. SECTARIAN TENSIONS The government is still divided, partly on sectarian lines, over the fate of dozens of civil servants abducted from a Sunni-run Baghdad ministry on Tuesday by squads of men in police garb who many suspect were members of a Shi'ite militia. There was also no word on Friday about dozens of Shi'ite bus passengers feared kidnapped at fake security checkpoints on Thursday in a Sunni district of west Baghdad. Sectarian tensions were fuelled on Friday by an arrest warrant in a terrorism investigation for the country's top Sunni cleric. Harith al-Dari accused the Shi'ite-led government of trying to divert attention from its own "crimes", naming the kidnap from the Higher Education Ministry this week. The Islamic Party, the biggest Sunni party in Shi'ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's national unity government, said the move was the "mercy bullet" that would finish off a plan seeking to reach out to Saddam Hussein's disaffected fellow Sunnis. At Friday prayers, Sunni preachers condemned the warrant for Dari, who calls attacks on U.S. troops "legitimate resistance". Wanted on suspicion of fomenting sectarian division, he is safely out of the country in Jordan. "If Harith al-Dari is arrested we will bring down the government and burn Baghdad," cleric Khalid Abdullah thundered at Friday prayers in the rebellious Sunni city of Falluja. He and fellow Sunni preachers accused the government of pursuing a sectarian agenda by seeking to arrest Dari while failing to curb death squads loyal to Shi'ite parties. The government hastily sought to distance itself from the warrant for the leader of the Muslim Clerics' Association. Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih, an ethnic Kurd, said the warrant had been issued by the judiciary, not the government. But he acknowledged partisan agendas are hampering government efforts at national reconciliation. (Additional reporting by Alastair Macdonald, Ahmed Rasheed, Claudia Parsons and Ross Colvin in Baghdad, Lin Noueihed and Firouz Sedarat in Dubai and Boris Groendahl in Vienna)
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