BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 9 — The Sunni Arab-owned security company where about 50 employees were kidnapped on Wednesday was under investigation for possibly collaborating with the antigovernment insurgency, a top-level Interior Ministry official said today.
The official, Maj. Gen. Mehdi Sabih Hashem al-Garawi, commander of a paramilitary police unit, said in an interview that his investigators had been examining the company. Many of its employees were members of Saddam Hussein's security forces, said a company employee who escaped abduction.
The company was also operating without a license, which was canceled last year, according to ministry documents.
Witnesses to the kidnapping said the attackers were driving vehicles and wearing uniforms resembling those used by paramilitary units of the Interior Ministry, which oversees the police. But no one has claimed responsibility for the assault, and the whereabouts of the workers remains a mystery.
The brother of an administrator for the company, who requested anonymity out of fear for his safety, said his family had been told by a government official that the employees were being held at a government detention center in Baghdad, but Interior Ministry officials denied this.
General Garawi and several other ministry officials denied that their agency had had any role in the operation, and a spokesman for the Defense Ministry said the military was not involved. Several officials said the Interior Ministry had opened an investigation, although the minister himself, Bayan Jabr, made no formal statement and, according to an aide, was unavailable to comment.
American military officials, while confirming the kidnapping, seemed mystified. "We don't know who did that," Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, a spokesman for the American military, said during a news conference in Baghdad. "We have no indication from the Iraqi authorities that they know."
The incident, and the Iraqi government's muddy response, reflected the often bewildering opacity of the Iraqi government, particularly the Interior Ministry, and the murky culture of public safety in Iraq, where the line between legitimate police work and criminal behavior often seems to blur.
Sunni Arab leaders have increasingly accused the Shiite-led government, particularly the Interior Ministry's paramilitary police units, of operating death squads in a dirty war against Sunni Arabs. The American ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, has been pushing Iraqi politicians to cleanse the ministry of its pro-Shiite partisans, and the American military is employing at a variety of strategies to counteract the growing influence of Shiite militias in the police forces.
But Shiite leaders have contended that antigovernment insurgents and other criminals have committed these crimes masquerading as government forces, using stolen uniforms and vehicles.
Concerns about sectarianism in the security forces intensified after the bombing of a major Shiite shrine in Samarra on Feb. 22. After the attack, mobs led by Shiite militiamen attacked dozens of Sunni mosques and left hundreds dead while many police units stood aside, according to witnesses.
Haidar al-Ibadi, an adviser to Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, said in a telephone interview today that more than 500 bodies had been brought to the Baghdad morgue in the week and a half after the bombing.
In a rash of violence today, at least 15 people died in insurgent attacks around the country, including six civilians who were killed by in a roadside bomb in Baghdad that seemed intended for a passing Iraqi Army convoy, the police said.
A United States marine was killed on Wednesday in an insurgent attack in Anbar Province, the American military announced today.
The company that employed the kidnapped workers, Al Rawafid Security Company, is owned by a nephew of Sheik Ghazi al-Yawer, one of Iraq's two vice presidents and a Sunni Arab, according to a company employee who requested anonymity for fear of retribution. An aide to Mr. Yawer said the vice president was traveling abroad and was unavailable for comment.
Al Rawafid's main client is the Iraqna Telephone Company, which operates the country's biggest cellular telephone network.
Mr. Jabr, the interior minister, had told reporters on Saturday that he was seeking to reduce the number of private security companies because many were "militias in disguise," according to Agence France-Presse.
"When I arrived at the ministry, I found there were 250 such firms," he said, according to the news agency. "I investigated them and found out a number of them were phantom companies employing suspicious people. My services started to reduce their numbers from 250 to 80, and even that seems excessive."
The American authorities have been pressing the government to disband private militias. The country's most powerful Shiite party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which oversees the Interior Ministry, has its own Iranian-trained militia, the Badr Organization, many members of which are thought to have infiltrated the police forces.
In Dora, a southern Baghdad neighborhood, a gunfight broke out today between an Interior Ministry special police unit and a dozen members of a government-contracted security force guarding an oil pipeline. One of the guards was killed and four were wounded, officials said.
Also today, 15 Iraqi insurgents convicted of terrorism six months ago were hanged, according to Bushu Ibrahim Ali, the deputy justice minister. It was the third group of insurgents to be executed under Iraq's death penalty, the minister said in a telephone interview.