BAGHDAD, 7 February 2007 — Gunmen in Iraqi Army uniform kidnapped a senior Iranian diplomat in Baghdad, Iraqi and Iranian officials said yesterday. Tehran blamed the US military and demanded his immediate release.
“We are dealing with this as a kidnapping,” an Iraqi government official told Reuters.
The official said the diplomat, the second secretary at the Iranian Embassy in Baghdad, was snatched in the central Karrada district on Sunday by 30 gunmen wearing the uniform of a special Iraqi Army unit that often works with US military forces in Iraq.
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini blamed US forces for the kidnapping of Jalal Sharafi, saying it was carried out by a group attached to Iraq’s Defense Ministry “which works under the supervision of American forces.”
The ministry said it had summoned the Swiss and Iraqi ambassadors to Iran to protest the abduction. The Swiss Embassy handles US affairs in Iran, which has no diplomatic relations with Washington.
US forces in Iraq have arrested a number of Iranians, including diplomats, in the past two months, and are still holding five Iranians. Washington accuses Tehran of aiding militants fighting US forces in Iraq and US President George W. Bush has vowed to disrupt such support.
“It seems that this terrorist act has been committed in the framework of Bush’s order and with the goal of escalating the confrontation with Iran,” Iran’s ambassador to Iraq, Hassan Kazemi-Qomi, was quoted by Iranian state television as saying.
A US military spokesman denied that US forces had played a role in the incident, which comes amid tensions between the United States and Iran over Tehran’s nuclear program. “We are not aware of any mission that even resembles this incident,” a US military spokesman in Baghdad, Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, said.
The Iraqi official said the gunmen drove in four-wheel-drive vehicles and a BMW and were wearing uniforms of the Iraqi 36th Commando Battalion, a special operations unit that works with US forces. The official said that police close to the scene opened fire on the gunmen and arrested six of them. Later, another security force came to the police station and said they were taking the six to the Serious Crimes building in Baghdad but the police discovered later that they never arrived there.
