KEY POINTS:
ZUBAYR, Iraq - Iraqi police freed two American hostages in a raid today but a third foreigner was found dead a day after they were kidnapped when their truck convoy was hijacked at a bogus security checkpoint.
It was not clear if the dead man was one of two other American private security contractors or an Austrian taken hostage in the same incident near the Kuwaiti border, an official working for the governor of Basra province said.
After the successful recovery in Zubayr, just south of the city of Basra, operations were continuing in the town's Dewajin district to find the two missing men, a police source said.
Earlier, Arab media quoted Iraqi police as saying the Austrian, a 25-year-old former soldier, had been killed.
In an apparently unrelated incident in Zubayr earlier on Friday, the British military said a British private security guard was wounded in a clash with Iraqi police. The police said two policemen and another Westerner were killed.
British troops also killed two gunmen in a raid near the border town of Safwan although spokesman Captain Tane Dunlop said it was not related to the hunt for the five foreigners.
He declined to comment on Iraqi security sources' comments that British and US 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.
It 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 US and British backers about the infiltration of security forces by sectarian militias and criminal gangs.
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 are members of a Shi'ite militia.
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.
In Zubayr, an enclave of Iraq's Sunni minority in the mainly Shi'ite south, police said colleagues stopped an unmarked car. Westerners in civilian clothes inside opened fire, killing two officers and wounding two women passers-by.
Police returned fire, killing one of the Westerners and wounding another. They said they believed the foreigners were American but British spokesman Dunlop said at least one man wounded in the incident was a British security contractor.
There has been friction between private security firms, which employ tens of thousands of foreigners in Iraq, and the growing Iraqi security forces. Earlier this week, police in Nassiriya said they had detained four foreign civilians working for a British company, saying they fired on a police checkpoint.
- REUTERS
