BAGHDAD, March 8: Armed men in police uniform seized 50 Iraqi private security guards from their firm’s compound on Wednesday, police said, but officials contradicted each other over whether they were arrested or kidnapped.

Three of the most senior officials in the interior ministry insisted no raid was authorised on the company in Baghdad. Two other officials said the private guards had been arrested by genuine police commandos.

One senior official in the interior ministry said police raided the company after a complaint from a corporate client dissatisfied with the firm’s security services.

But Maj Gen Mohammed al Hassan, the ministry’s head of operations, said in a statement: “The interior ministry is not involved in any way in this arrest.” The confusion was not unusual in matters relating to Iraq’s security forces, which were accused in a US State Department report on Wednesday of widespread torture and other abuses.

The US-backed Iraqi government has admitted that some units have operated beyond its control.

Police officers working at their Baghdad headquarters said witnesses and patrol officers had reported that about 50 employees of the security firm had been taken away from their headquarters by men in uniform driving police pick-up trucks.

The ministry says many accounts of gunmen in police uniform abducting and killing civilians are the result of guerillas stealing their uniforms.

In a measure of the problems the police face, one senior official, who said no official raid had been authorised, questioned why the security company employees had surrendered to the uniformed force without a fight.—Reuters