US, Iraqi troops hunt for Britons; militia blamed

US and Iraqi soldiers searched Baghdad's Sadr City slum yesterday for five kidnapped Britons who Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zebari said had probably been seized by a Shi'ite Muslim militia.

Troops raided Sadr City, a stronghold of the Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi Army, after dozens of gunmen kidnapped a British computer expert and four bodyguards from a government building on Tuesday.

An Iraqi government official said the kidnappings could have been retaliation for the killing of the top commander of the militia in the southern city of Basra by British-backed Iraqi troops last week.

"It may be the Mehdi Army because the location of the (kidnapping) is in their theatre of operations," said Mr Zebari.

"Their safety is our top priority... I don't think they will (kill) them. They are using them for bargaining, but they have not contacted anybody yet." British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett said British officials were working with Iraqi authorities to find out how the Britons were abducted and to secure their swift release.

"This is clearly a very distressing time for all concerned," Ms Beckett told reporters in Berlin where she was attending a G8 foreign ministers' meeting.

An Interior Ministry spokesman dismissed suggestions the kidnappers, dressed in police commando uniforms and driving official vehicles, were a renegade unit from his ministry.

Interior Ministry forces are known to be heavily infiltrated by Shi'ite militias, including the Mehdi Army, and have often been accused of kidnappings and sectarian killings.

But a top official in Sadr's political movement, Abdul Mahdi al-Mutiri, said the scale and organisation of Tuesday's operation was beyond the Mehdi Army's capabilities.

A government employee who witnessed the kidnappings gave new details of the incident and told how two other Westerners had narrowly escaped being abducted by the gunmen at a Finance Ministry building in Palestine Street.

A second witness, an Iraqi guard at the building, said the leader of the gunmen was a man in a police major's uniform who spoke in fluent English to the hostages.

The ministry identified the kidnapped British expert as an employee of BearingPoint, a US-based consulting firm that has worked in Iraq since 2003.

The kidnappings were a challenge to a major security crackdown in the capital by US and Iraqi troops. The troops are trying to stabilise Baghdad, epicentre of sectarian violence, but bombings, shootings and kidnappings continue.