U.S., Iraqi troops hunt for Britons; militia blamed

By Mariam Karouny and Ahmed Rasheed

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - U.S. and Iraqi soldiers raided Baghdad's Sadr City slum on Wednesday, searching for five kidnapped Britons who Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zebari said had probably been seized by a Shi'ite Muslim militia.

In Washington, U.S. officials said President George W. Bush held a video conference with Iraqi leaders and would like to see a lengthy U.S. troop presence in Iraq like the one in South Korea to provide stability but not in a frontline combat role.

Bush urged the Iraqi leaders to make progress toward an oil revenue-sharing plan and political reforms to help prevent a slide into all-out civil war between the Shi'ite majority and Sunni Arabs, once-dominant under Saddam Hussein.

The U.S. and Iraqi troops raided Sadr City, a stronghold of the Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi Army militia, after dozens of gunmen kidnapped a British computer expert and four British 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 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.

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 organization of Tuesday's operation was beyond the Mehdi Army's capabilities.

ESCAPE

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.

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

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