By Joshua Partlow and Bassam Sebti
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, June 22, 2006

BAGHDAD, June 21 -- Gunmen ambushed buses carrying dozens of factory workers north of Baghdad on Wednesday afternoon in one of the largest mass kidnappings of the Iraq war.

The identities of the kidnappers and the scope of their raid in the town of Taji, about 12 miles outside the capital, remained unclear Wednesday night, but Interior Ministry officials said that as many as 125 people were abducted.

The gunmen seized three buses, each carrying about 40 workers, at about 3:30 p.m. as they were leaving the Victory Industrial Plant, a factory that produced weapons during the rule of Saddam Hussein, according to Maj. Raad Mahmoud of the Interior Ministry Operations Room. The factory, located in a largely Sunni Muslim area of Taji and owned by the Industry Ministry, produces concrete blast walls and barbed wire, according to an employee.

The afternoon attack overshadowed the grisly discovery of the body of a lawyer who had represented Hussein in his ongoing trial. The body of Khamis al-Obeidi, one of several attorneys on the former president's defense team, was found shot dead on a Baghdad street, said Gen. Mohammed al-Dulaimi of the Interior Ministry. Obeidi is the third attorney for Hussein killed since the trial began in October.

Meanwhile, at a late-night news conference, President Jalal Talabani said a government committee had approved Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's plan for reconciliation among Iraq's warring factions. The long-anticipated proposal, expected to be the most comprehensive effort yet to engage Iraq's insurgency in political dialogue, is to be presented to parliament Sunday.

Maliki's plan was expected to be announced earlier this month, but disputes over several issues led to further deliberations. The prospect that it could include amnesty for insurgents who have killed Americans drew a strong denunciation from the U.S. Senate. While providing no details about the plan's contents, Talabani said it had been substantially amended in recent days.

In Taji, estimates of the number of captives taken Wednesday varied widely. The Associated Press reported that about 85 workers, thought to be predominantly Shiite Muslims, had been kidnapped from an area near the parking lot of the plant complex. A police official from Taji, 1st Lt. Mehdi Abdul Sahib, said the gunmen took 150 workers from four buses.

An employee at the factory, Jawdet Naser Hussein, 35, who did not go to work Wednesday because fliers distributed by area residents warned that harm might come to the workers, gave an account told to him by a colleague who was abducted and released. Hussein said the kidnappers arrived in five minivans and surrounded the employee buses. The kidnappers separated men from women, then focused on Shiites from certain Baghdad neighborhoods, he was told. Eventually they released about 20 people, he said.

"They interrogated us; they did not harm us," Hussein said he was told by the colleague, whom he did not identify. "Once they were convinced that we did not take part in killing any Sunnis, they released us."

In addition to the more than 400 foreigners abducted in Iraq since 2003, thousands of Iraqis have been taken captive. As of March, 30 to 40 Iraqis are seized by kidnappers each day, according to statistics compiled by the Brookings Institution. The prospect of thousands of dollars in ransom motivates some kidnappings. Others, inspired by rivalries between Muslim sects, are just a prelude to a violent death.

It was unclear who killed Obeidi, Hussein's attorney, who was taken from his home in Baghdad and deposited dead on a sidewalk, said Dulaimi, of the Interior Ministry.

Hussein's chief attorney, Khalil al-Dulaimi, said by telephone from his home in Amman, Jordan, that he believed Shiite militiamen were responsible for the killing. "The defense team did its utmost to reveal the truth in defending the legitimate president of Iraq and his colleagues, which is the thing [the militias] don't want," Dulaimi said.

A lawyer with the International Justice Program of Human Rights Watch, Nehal Bhuta, called Obeidi's killing a "disaster waiting to happen." After the two other defense attorneys were killed, the Iraqi government agreed to approve gun licenses and pay for security guards for the lawyers, but the licenses have been difficult to obtain and no payments have been made, Bhuta said.

"There hasn't been a durable solution to the problem of security," he said. "I can't see how people can have confidence in the safety of lawyers in this trial or the next trial."

Correspondent Jonathan Finer and special correspondents K.I. Ibrahim and Saad al-Izzi and other Washington Post staff members in Iraq contributed to this report.