Iraqi government colluded in "perfect kidnap", report claims

Jul 31, 2009, 9:53 GMT

London - The Iraqi government is likely to have colluded in a 'highly-organized' attack on the finance ministry in Baghdad two years ago in which five Britons were taken hostage, a report in London's Guardian newspaper said Friday.

Earlier this week, the British government said it now believed that a further two of the hostages had died, following confirmation of the death of two of the captured men last month.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown said he believed that the last remaining hostage, IT consultant Peter Moore, was still alive.

The men were abducted during a conference at the finance ministry in Baghdad on May 29, 2007, when more than 40 attackers dressed in police uniforms stormed the building.

According to the Guardian, a sixth Westerner, a US IT consultant, was also at the ministry that day but he escaped capture by hiding in a toilet.

An unnamed senior Iraqi intelligence source told The Guardian the highly-organized kidnapping was 'one only a government can do.'

Moore, he said, had been installing a computer system to track billions of pounds in foreign aid and oil revenue through the finance ministry.

'Many people don't want a high level of corruption to be revealed. Remember this is the information technology centre, this is the place where all the money to do with Iraq and all Iraq's financial matters are housed,' the Iraqi intelligence source told the paper.

Paul Wood, a former British Army officer who investigated the abduction, also said the kidnapping was 'too perfect.'

'It would make sense to think that there was someone on the inside telling the kidnappers when to come, what to expect and how to deal with any security issues they were going to face,' Wood said.

'It strikes me as unlikely that there couldn't have been some kind of collaboration for the convoy of that size,' he said.

The bodies of two of Moore's security guards, Britons Jason Swindlehurst and Jason Creswell, were returned to Britain last month. They died from gunshot wounds, post-mortem examinations showed.

Government officials said this week that the other two Britons, Alan McMenemy and Alec MacLachlan, are now also 'very likely' to be dead.

The kidnappers, calling themselves the Islamic Shiite Resistance in Iraq, issued several videos featuring the captives. They were reported to have demanded the release of nine Iraqi militants held in US custody in Iraq.

The release of a leading Shiite insurgent, Laith al-Khazali, by US forces on June 6, had sparked fresh hopes that the Britons could be freed.