Foreigner killed, two freed after Iraq hijack

ZUBAYR, Iraq, Nov 17 (Reuters) Iraqi police freed two American hostages in a raid today 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 mainly Shi'ite southern 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 today, 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 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 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 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.

REUTERS SY KP0003