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Hundreds of Iraqi and US troops cordoned off sections of Baghdad's Sadr City slum early Wednesday and conducted a series of raids in an apparent effort to find five British citizens abducted from a nearby government building the day before, local residents and police said.

British Embassy officials held ongoing talks Wednesday with Iraqi officials to discuss the situation, Britain's Foreign Office said. Britain's COBRA crisis committee was also to meet for the second day.

The five men were pulled out of a Finance Ministry office by about 40 heavily armed men in police uniforms in broad daylight on Tuesday and driven in a convoy of 19 four-wheel-drive vehicles toward Sadr City, according to Iraqi officials in the Interior and Finance ministries.

A senior Iraqi official said the radical Shi'ite Mahdi Army militia was suspected in the attack.

British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett said officials were doing all they could to secure the "swift and safe return" of the five kidnapped Britons.

"This is clearly a very distressing time for all concerned," she said arriving at a Group of Eight (G8) meeting in Potsdam, Germany.

Foreign Office officials are "offering help and assistance to the next of kin" of the Britons, Beckett said.

"It is not helpful at this stage to speculate on what might have happened," she said. "We are working closely with the Iraqi authorities to establish the facts and doing all we can to secure their swift and safe return."

Soon after the abduction, Iraqi forces established a special battalion of Iraqi soldiers and police officers to search for the men, said Brigadier General Qassim al Musawi, an Iraqi army spokesman.

"We are conducting search operations near the site where the abduction took place," he said Wednesday. "Maybe today or in the coming few days, we will find them with the help of secret intelligence."

Residents of Sadr City said hundreds of American and Iraqi troops sealed off areas of the Shi'ite neighborhood overnight and carried out a series of arrest raids that lasted until dawn.

Hours after the abduction, Joe Gavaghan, a spokesman for Montreal-based security firm GardaWorld, confirmed that four of its security workers and one client were kidnapped. All four GardaWorld workers are British citizens, he said, declining to provide more details.

A spokesman for BearingPoint, a McLean, Virginia-based management consulting firm, said one of the company's employees, apparently the client referred to by Gavaghan, was among those abducted.

The kidnappings, if the work of the Mahdi Army as asserted by several Iraqi officials, could be retaliation for the killing by British forces last week of the militia's commander in Basra.

Canon Andrew White, the Anglican vicar of Baghdad, who lives in the Garda World compound and is involved in efforts to free the men, said it's "a strong possibility" the kidnapping was a retaliation for the killing.
 
"We have been in contact with (the Mahdi Army) and are doing our best to try and continue that contact throughout the day," he told BBC radio.

The raid was reminiscent of an attack by the Shi'ite militiamen, dressed as Interior Ministry commandos, who stormed a Higher Education Ministry office on November 14 and snatched away as many as 200 people. Dozens of those kidnap victims have never been found.

Major General Abdul-Karim Khalaf, the Interior Ministry spokesman, said the abduction on Tuesday was carried out by men wearing police uniforms who showed up at the Finance Ministry data collection facility in 19 four-wheel drive vehicles of the type used by police. He said the band of kidnappers sped off across the Army Canal to the east. Sadr City, the Shiite Mahdi Army stronghold, is directly east of the Canal.

"We are pursuing this case very vigorously, first to release them, secondly to establish the truth of what happened, who was responsible," Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari told BBC radio Wednesday.

Zebari said that the government has long believed that its security forces were infiltrated by militia members.

"The number of people who were involved in the operation - to seal off the building, to set roadblocks, to get into the building with such confidence - (means they) must have some connection," he said.

(China Daily via agencies May 31, 2007)