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US and Iraqi troops search Sadr City for missing Britons

US and Iraqi troops raided Baghdad's Sadr City neighborhood on Wednesday, looking for five British citizens abducted a day earlier from a nearby government building, military and diplomatic officials said.

The search was part of a larger effort involving the military and Iraqi officials, and diplomats from Britain and the US to locate the British men or make contact with their abductors, according to two Western diplomats. The operation began in the early morning as troops surrounded houses demanding information about the kidnapping victims, a resident of the area said.

Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Garver, an Army spokesman, confirmed that an operation was under way in Sadr City, a stronghold of the Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army, but he would not say whether the troops were looking for the British kidnapping victims.

Separately, a spokesman for the US embassy in Baghdad, Dan Sreebny, said that two of its Iraqi employees were believed to have been kidnapped. He gave no further details.

In a statement, the US military condemned the bombing of a Sunni mosque in southwest Baghdad on Wednesday and another bombing of a Shiite mosque a day earlier. The statement did not provide a location for the earlier bombing, and it gave no details about whether people were killed or wounded in the attacks. The bombings could not be independently confirmed.

The British kidnapping victims, a business consultant and four bodyguards, were abducted on Tuesday from a Finance Ministry complex by a large group of uniformed men in multiple vehicles. The men entered a guarded Finance Ministry complex in eastern Baghdad, took the Britons and left without firing a shot, according to witnesses and Iraqi officials.

Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said in an interview with Reuters that the Mahdi Army may have carried out the kidnappings in retaliation for the killing of the militia's top commander by Iraqi special forces last week in Basra.
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