ZUBAYR, Iraq, 18 November 2006 — Iraqi police freed two American hostages in a raid yesterday but a third foreigner was found dead, a day after they were kidnapped when their truck convoy was hijacked at a bogus security checkpoint.

An official working for the governor of southern Basra province said 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. A senior police source in Zubayr, south of the city of Basra, said operations were continuing to find the two missing men after the raid in the town, a stronghold of the Sunni Arab minority in Iraq.

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 yesterday, 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 Capt. Tane Dunlop said it was not related to the hunt for the five foreigners.

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 hostage. 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 Shiite militia.

Sectarian tensions were fueled yesterday by an arrest warrant in a terrorism investigation for the country’s top Sunni leader. Harith Al-Dari accused the Shiite-led government of trying to divert attention from its own crimes, naming the kidnap from the ministry this week.

The arrest warrant enraged his followers yesterday and deepened a violent sectarian divide that Washington has pressed the Shiite-led government to heal. The Islamic Party, the biggest Sunni political party in Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki’s national unity government, said the move was the “mercy bullet” that would finish off a reconciliation plan seeking to reach out to disaffected Sunnis.

At Friday prayers, Sunni preachers condemned the warrant for Sheikh Harith Al-Dari, which Interior Minister Jawad Al-Bolani, a Shiite, announced on Thursday night. Bolani said Dari, who has backed insurgent attacks on US troops as “legitimate resistance,” was wanted on suspicion of terrorism and stirring up sectarian division.

“If Harith Al-Dari is arrested we will bring down the government and burn Baghdad,” vowed Khalid Abdullah, a preacher of the minority Sunnis in the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah. He and fellow Sunni preachers accused the government of pursuing a sectarian agenda by seeking to arrest Dari while failing to curb death squads loyal to Shiite parties.

The government hastily sought to distance itself from the warrant for Dari. He is secretary general of the influential Muslim Clerics’ Association which called on Sunni parties to pull out of the government in protest.

Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih said the warrant had been issued by the judiciary, not the government, which is struggling to contain a three-year-old insurgency and sectarian bloodshed that has killed thousands.

“There are some cases that are under investigation and it is up to the Iraqi judiciary to take the decisions,” Salih said. Dari, now in Jordan, told al Arabiya television he was ready to return to Iraq on condition Maliki and President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd and fellow Sunni who has accused him of “sectarian sedition,” face similar charges. In response to charges that he supports Al-Qaeda, Dari says he does not back insurgents who target innocent civilians. “I do not bestow legitimacy on anyone who harms our people or works against the interests of Iraq ... I bestow legitimacy on the Iraqi resistance that resists the occupation,” he told Al Jazeera.