Austrian, U.S. contractors abducted in southern Iraq

BAGHDAD, Iraq – British soldiers backed by U.S. military helicopters battled insurgents near the Kuwaiti border Friday, close to where a private security team of four Americans and an Austrian were kidnapped. A top police official said a criminal gang had snatched the men and demanded ransom.

Gunmen wearing police uniforms abducted the security team near Safwan, a largely Sunni Arab city of 200,000 people in southern Iraq. The attack took place shortly after the Westerners had crossed the Kuwaiti border with a large convoy of supply trucks.

The convoy was traveling on the Iraq Military Road, which is infrequently used by civilian vehicles. Sunni insurgents attack supply convoys on a daily basis, not only on the roads from Kuwait but also from Turkey to the north and Jordan to the west.

Basra police Maj. Gen. Ali al-Moussawi refused to give details of the ransom demand late Friday after a series of confused and apparently incorrect reports that variously claimed the Austrian had been found dead and one of the Americans was gravely wounded. Another discounted report came from the Basra governor, who had said two Americans were freed and one hostage killed.

Al-Moussawi said police believed the five employees of the Crescent Security Co. were being held in the Safwan region along with trucks from the convoy.

British soldiers and U.S. military helicopters fought with gunmen in the area where the Crescent Security Group convoy was hijacked, and coalition forces searched for the hostages, according to an official for Crescent Security in Kuwait. He would speak only on condition of anonymity.

British military spokesman Capt. Tane Dunlop said the British and U.S. assault targeted gunmen who had been attacking coalition forces in the past few days. He said the coalition force had been attacked by about 10 gunmen from farm buildings.

The British and U.S. forces returned fire, killing at least two of the gunmen, Dunlop said in a telephone interview from Basra.

In London, a spokeswoman at Britain’s Ministry of Defense said, “We were looking to arrest individuals involved in terrorist activities.” She said the raid was unrelated to the Crescent Security hostages.

Neither Crescent Security nor the U.S. government has identified the missing Americans.

However, a State Department official informed the family of Paul Reuben, 39, a former suburban Minneapolis police officer who was working as a security contractor in Iraq, that he was among those captured, his brother, Patrick Reuben, told the Star-Tribune newspaper and KSTP-TV in St. Paul, Minn.

Patrick Reuben said his brother had been in Iraq for about two years working for Crescent Security and intended to earn enough money to buy a house and a Hummer and then come home.