BAGHDAD, 15 November 2006 — Gunmen dressed as police commandos kidnapped up to 150 staff and visitors in a lightning raid on a Baghdad research institute yesterday as police looked the other way.
Hours later, the Interior Ministry said three of the kidnap victims were apparently set free and found unharmed along eastern Baghdad’s Palestine Street.
The fate of the remaining kidnap victims remained unknown.
The Interior Ministry said it arrested five senior police officers in connection with the kidnapping, including the police chief for Karradah, the central Baghdad neighborhood where the Higher Education Ministry facility was located.
Also taken into custody were the commander of the police brigade in charge of the area and three other officers, spokesman Maj. Gen. Jalil Khalaf, said.
Iraq’s higher education minister immediately ordered all universities closed until security was improved, saying he was not ready to see more professors get killed. “I have only one choice which is to suspend classes at universities. We have no other choice,” Abed Theyab said in an address to Parliament.
A witness who works in the building but had stepped out when the gunmen arrived said he returned to see police standing idly by as the kidnappers checked identity cards, apparently sorting Sunnis from Shiites and then drove off with Sunni men.
However senior officials, often keen to play down sectarian tension, said men from both Muslim sects were taken. Shiites were among distraught relatives seeking information on missing family members after the raid.
“They were checking identity cards in the car park,” the witness, a civil servant at the Office of Delegations and Cultural Relations at the Higher Education Ministry, said. “They picked only the Sunni employees. They even took the man who was serving tea,” said the man. “They gathered them all in the pick-ups. At the same time I saw two police patrols watching, doing nothing,” he added.
Relatives of the hostages wept at the scene hours later. One man, dressed in a suit, could not control his rage after learning his father was among those taken — he punched one of the guards posted outside the building.
Another witness, who gave his name only as Mohammed, said he was in his small store next to the entrance to the office when about 20 cars arrived. “The cars blocked both ends of the road and the rest drove in. The guards must have thought it was the minister and opened the barrier for the cars,” he said.
“Then they took the guards and dragged the men out of the building, taking with them some of their cars. Some of the men put up a struggle and begged the militants to leave them alone but one of them said ‘Don’t worry, if you’ve done nothing wrong we’ll let you go’.”
Mohammed said the cars left after about 30 minutes and the women employees, who had been forced into a room, came out screaming.
Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki said the kidnapping was the result of rivalries among armed groups sponsored by different political factions.
