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Varying accounts of Tuesday's abduction of foreigners in Baghdad has led to widespread speculation and rumors about the nationality of the hostages.
The British foreign ministry confirmed Tuesday afternoon that five Brits had been abducted, including four bodyguards and a finance expert, but information is scattered on reports that three German computer technicians were also seized.
"So far, such reports haven't turned out to be correct and I hope this will continue to be the case," German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier told reporters in Hamburg today.
A security contracting source in Baghdad told Slogger that the initial reports of the captured Germans turned out to be false.
German officials also told Der Spiegel there are very few German nationals in Baghdad, and that the whereabouts of all had been confirmed. The 100 or so Germans in Baghdad are mostly embassy staff, security staff and spouses of Iraqi citizens who have been living in the country for a long time.
Spiegel reports that several high-ranking German officials in various departments have said the hostages are most likely to be British rather than German, but the officials said they didn't want to rule anything out because it was extremely difficult to verify any reports coming from Iraq.
Management and technology consulting firm BearingPoint Inc. on Tuesday said one its employees working in Iraq has been kidnapped.
AP reports the company believes its employee was one of five Westerners kidnapped Tuesday, said BearingPoint spokesman Steve Lunceford.
"We have been informed that a BearingPoint employee working in Iraq was taken from a work site early this morning," Lunceford wrote in an e-mail. "We are fully cooperating with local and international authorities to ascertain facts surrounding this incident and are supporting rescue efforts."
The UK Guardian reported that a security company called GardaWorld was investigating reports that its staff were involved in the kidnapping.
A spokeswoman for the firm, which has a number of British people working in Iraq, said: "We are working together with our teams in Iraq to fully investigate, in accordance with our procedures, what has actually happened. We are investigating the situation thoroughly at present."
