Britain's top-secret crisis unit was expected to meet for a second straight day yesterday as the government scrambles to secure the release of five Britons kidnapped in Baghdad in broad daylight.
Men wearing police uniforms abducted the group — four private security guards and the management consultant they were guarding — at gunpoint on Tuesday morning from a finance ministry building in the heart of the Iraqi capital.
The British government's Cobra committee, which can feature senior ministers and intelligence chiefs and meets on occasions such as the July 2005 London suicide bombings, was likely to convene again yesterday, officials said.
"We're working hard on the ground, we're liaising with the Iraqi authorities ... We have to just monitor things very closely. We have to establish the facts and there will be all sorts of decisions taken," a Foreign Office spokesman said.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair is on a farewell tour of Africa and a spokeswoman for his office said he was "fully aware" of what was happening, but would not comment on whether he had joined Tuesday's Cobra meeting remotely.
Blair told reporters on Tuesday in the Libyan coastal town of Sirte, where he held talks with the Libyan government, that Britain would do "everything we possibly can to help."
Analysts have said Cobra would probably be discussing contingency plans for a military rescue mission but this has not been confirmed and the unit's deliberations are a tightly guarded secret.
The Foreign Office spokesman could not comment on a report in the Daily Telegraph that the elite SAS commando unit, which specializes in such rescues, was on standby.
The SAS rescued British peace activist Norman Kember and two Canadian colleagues, James Loney and Harmeet Singh Sooden, after they were taken captive by an Islamist group last year.
Along with fellow Brits Margaret Hassan, an aid worker killed in 2004 and Ken Bigley, an engineer murdered the same year, Kember was one of the highest-profile kidnap cases in Iraq in recent years.
Andy Bearpark, director-general of the British Association of Private Security Companies, a trade organization, told Sky News television on Tuesday that many people had thought such "tragic cases" had stopped happening.
"The most worrying thing is the way the people were wearing police uniforms — if you can't tell friend from foe, that makes risk even riskier," he said.
Four of the five Britons were employees of Garda, a Canadian security firm.
The Times newspaper reported yesterday that a Basra-based commander from the Mahdi Army, a powerful Shiite militia led by influential cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, had claimed responsibility for the kidnapping.
Meanwhile, several mortar rounds apparently targeting a US military base in the restive city of Fallujah missed their mark yesterday and landed in a residential neighborhood, killing nine civilians and wounding 15 others, police and medical officials said.
The attack, which began at about 10am, sent many of the mortar rounds into the court house and residential communities. Most of the casualties came from the court house, said Anas al-Rawi of Fallujah General Hospital.
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