Americans seized in Iraq convoy hijack

SAFWAN, Iraq, Nov 17 (Reuters) British and US forces hunted four kidnapped Americans and an Austrian in southern Iraq today, a day after the truck convoy they were guarding was hijacked at a fake security checkpoint near the Kuwaiti border.

The foreigners' Kuwaiti employers and police sources could not confirm media reports the 25-year-old Austrian former soldier had been killed in a rescue operation.

They said there appeared to be confusion with a separate incident in the same area. The British military said a British private security guard was wounded in a clash with Iraqi police, who said two policemen and a Westerner were killed.

British troops also killed two gunmen in a raid near the border town of Safwan although spokesman Captain 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 dressed as police, US and other officials said.

It was the latest of several incidents this week in which gunmen in uniform have taken hostages. 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 Shi'ite militia.

Sectarian tensions were fuelled today by an arrest warrant in a terrorism investigation for the country's top Sunni cleric. Harith al-Dari accused the Shi'ite-led government of trying to divert attention from its own crimes, naming the kidnap from the ministry this week.

CONTRACTORS, POLICE CLASH In Zubayr, some 40 km north of Safwan, police said colleagues stopped an unmarked car late today morning. Westerners in civilian clothes inside opened fire, they said, killing two officers and wounding two women passers-by.

Police returned fire, killing one of the Westerners and wounding another. They said they believed the foreigners were American but British spokesman Dunlop said at least one man wounded in the incident was a British security contractor.

There has been friction between private security firms, which employ tens of thousands of foreigners in Iraq, and the growing Iraqi security forces. Earlier this week, police in Nassiriya said they had detained four foreign civilians working for a British company, saying they fired on a police checkpoint.

Foreigners abducted in the Shi'ite south have generally been released, unlike those seized further north where Sunni Muslim insurgents linked to al Qaeda have killed dozens of hostages.

However, anger at the US-led occupation has grown among powerful Shi'ite groups, and attacks on British forces and private convoys bringing in supplies from Kuwait have increased.

The family of one American security contractor told a US newspaper that US officials said he had been captured after an exchange of fire in which there were no reports of casualties.

Jennifer Reuben, sister-in-law of Paul Reuben, 39, told the Minneapolis Star Tribune he told her last week he was planning to leave Iraq because of safety fears. ''They hate us here,'' she quoted him as saying.

''They look you in the eye and say, 'Go home, Americans.'' REUTERS SY VV2318