Most of the dozens of hostages seized at a Higher Education Ministry building on Tuesday were freed in operations by security forces in Baghdad, state television Iraqiya said early on Wednesday.
There was no immediate confirmation of late night raids to free the hostages or word on whether any had been injured.
Amid new suspicions of police complicity in the latest and biggest mass kidnapping, the interior minister hauled in police chiefs to explain how dozens of gunmen swept into the Higher Education Ministry annexe, rounded up those inside, and drove them off in broad daylight toward a Shi’ite militia stronghold.
Iraqiya quoted an Interior Ministry spokesperson as saying operations were continuing in the early hours of Wednesday to free the remaining hostages.
Al-Furat, a TV station controlled by a major Shi’ite political group, said 25 hostages were still missing.
Officials initially said 100 or more men had been seized, but a government spokesperson later said 20 had been released within hours and the kidnappers were holding around 50 hostages.
Gunmen in Iraqi police uniforms snatched male staff and visitors from the ministry building in a brazen daylight raid.
Women were left behind after having their cellphones confiscated. Some of those released earlier in the day said they were driven to Sadr City, a Shi’ite militia stronghold in eastern Baghdad, Higher Education Minister Abd Dhiab said.
Washington has been pressing Shi’ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to crack down on militias notionally loyal to his allies but Maliki says he needs more time. Many of Saddam Hussein’s fellow Sunnis, and US commanders, complain the Iraqi police is heavily infiltrated by Shi’ite militias.
The White House, determined to build up Iraq’s security forces so it can hand over responsibility for security, will be watching the outcome anxiously as it reviews strategy under mounting domestic pressure to bring US troops home.
”The Ministry of Interior is taking every measure and moving towards some Baghdad areas where they suspect the hostages are being held,” government spokesperson Ali al-Dabbagh said earlier on Tuesday, declining to confirm some men were freed during the day in Sadr City, the stronghold of the Mehdi Army militia of radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.
”The minister himself is questioning all the officers in charge of that sector,” Dabbagh said of the busy, commercial Karrada district where the kidnap took place.
Senior police officials were arrested after another such raid six weeks ago, when the 26 employees of a meat-processing factory were taken by men in uniform. The head of Iraq’s Olympic Committee has not been heard of since he and 30 other officials and athletes were snatched from a meeting in Karrada in June.
Academics targeted
In dozens of other acts of violence, a car bomb killed 10 people at a Baghdad market and Iraqi officials said US forces killed at least 36 people in two overnight raids — on a Shi’ite district of the capital and in the restive Sunni city of Ramadi.
The higher education minister noted the kidnap followed dozens of killings of academics and told Parliament he feared for the future of Iraq’s beleaguered universities.
He dismissed reports he was suggesting campuses simply shut down, however, despite slumping attendance because of bloodshed.
Minister Dhiab is from the main Sunni political bloc and many Iraqi ministries are effectively fiefdoms of one party. But, Dhiab, in common with other senior officials, declined to blame one sectarian group or another for the raid.
”It’s a terrorist act,” he said.
Both Sunni insurgents and Shi’ite militias have been blamed for mass kidnappings in the past and gunmen have on occasion released some of those initially seized based on their sect.
US President George Bush has said he is open to ”fresh perspectives” to stem violence killing dozens a day after his Republicans lost control of Congress in elections last week.
He reacted sceptically to Democrat calls for a schedule for a phased withdrawal, however, and to suggestions he seek help from Syria, and possibly Iran, to help stabilise Iraq.
Bush is waiting for proposals from the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, which heard on Tuesday from his main ally in Iraq, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, that solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was key to stabilising Iraq.
”The biggest single factor, [Blair] said, in getting moderate Muslim countries to support a new Iraq, would be if there was progress on Israel and Palestine as part of a strategy for the Middle East as a whole — a point the Prime Minister made repeatedly to the group,” the spokesperson said. – Reuters