U.S. Hunts for 5 Britons Abducted in Iraq

BAGHDAD, May 30 -- Scores of U.S. troops descended on the vast Shiite district of Sadr City in Baghdad late Tuesday and early Wednesday, residents there said, searching several houses in what appeared to be an intense hunt for a British financial consultant and four British bodyguards abducted Tuesday.

The five were taken from a Finance Ministry building by dozens of men dressed in police uniforms as the consultant, who works for the American firm BearingPoint, delivered a lecture under a contract with the U.S. Agency for International Development, a U.S. Embassy official said.

The size and efficiency of the kidnapping force, the ease with which it carried out the operation in a government building and the Finance Ministry's proximity to Sadr City, about 1.5 miles away, all pointed to a possible connection to Shiite militias, Iraqi officials said.

The Mahdi Army militia loyal to anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr has its stronghold in Sadr City, but a spokesman for the cleric said the militia was not involved in the kidnappings.

"It has been a known fact for some time that the Interior Ministry police, security units and forces are corrupt, are penetrated," Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari told BBC radio Wednesday, saying he suspected the Mahdi Army of involvement in the abductions.

"The number of people who were involved in the operation to seal off the building, to set roadblocks and to get into the building with such confidence must have some connections," he said. "There must be some unholy, unruly militias working beyond the law in that area, with this connection with the local police, to be able to kidnap these people."

Kidnappings of foreigners have become fairly rare in Iraq, but kidnappings of Iraqis are a daily occurrence, as was illustrated Wednesday. Police in Hawijah, about 30 miles southwest of the northern city of Kirkuk, said 17 farm laborers working at an Iraqi army base were abducted when their bus stopped at a fake checkpoint set up by gunmen wearing police uniforms.

A U.S. source familiar with the Baghdad abductions, but who was not authorized to speak publicly about them, said it was "the feeling of 99 percent of the people in the embassy" that the Mahdi Army or rogue elements of it were somehow involved.

Security officials said the kidnappings could have been tied to the killing in Basra last week of a top Mahdi Army commander, Wissam Abu Qadir, by Iraqi special forces operating with British military advisers.

Ahmed Shaibani, a senior aide to Sadr in the holy city of Najaf, denied that Sadr's political group or the Mahdi Army had anything to do with the kidnappings, or that the abductions were in any way connected with the killing of Abu Qadir.

"Many figures from the Sadr trend were killed by the hand of British and American forces in Iraq, and there was no reaction from the Mahdi Army because Moqtada al-Sadr always calls for calm and self-control," he said.

Abu Zahraa, an official from Sadr's office in Sadr City, and local resident Raid Abu Hasan said that dozens of armored vehicles deployed in Sadr City on Wednesday morning, targeting three houses.