Irish Journalist Kidnapped After Interview in Baghdad

Gunmen kidnapped Irish journalist Rory Carroll, 33, who was working for the London-based Guardian newspaper, as he left an interview with a family in the capital’s Sadr City district.

Carroll had been talking to a family about the trial of ousted dictator Saddam Hussein on Wednesday, a day that saw a series of violent events and the arrest of Hussein’s nephew, whom two senior Iraqi security officials described as the top financier of the insurgency.

Guardian Editor Alan Rusbridger appealed for Carroll’s release in a front-page story today.

“We are deeply concerned ...,” Rusbridger wrote. “We urge those holding him to release him swiftly, for the sake of his family and for the sake of anyone who believes the world needs to be kept fully informed about events in Iraq.”

Meanwhile, Yasir Sabawi Ibrahim, son of Hussein’s half-brother Sabawi Ibrahim Hasan, was arrested in a Baghdad apartment several days after Syrian authorities forced him to return to Iraq, the two officials said. They spoke on condition of anonymity because their comments were not authorized.

They said they believed Ibrahim was using funds of Hussein’s now-outlawed Baath Party in Syria, Jordan and Yemen and was running a vast network of insurgents in Iraq. They also said he was coordinating between Baathist insurgents and the terrorist network of Jordanian-born militant Abu Musab Zarqawi.

One official, a coordinator between Iraqi authorities and U.S. military intelligence, described Ibrahim as the most dangerous man in the insurgency.

Insurgent violence across Iraq killed at least two dozen people.

The U.S. military announced the deaths of three soldiers and the wounding of one after their patrol was hit by a roadside bomb near Balad.

A soldier was killed and four were wounded when their vehicle caught fire near Tikrit, a separate announcement said. Nearly 1,990 U.S. service members have died since the conflict began in March 2003.

Four mortar attacks in Samarra, 60 miles northwest of Baghdad, killed six people and injured 16. Most of the injuries were serious, and several victims were transferred to a hospital in Tikrit, officials said.

Near Iskandariya, 30 miles south of Baghdad, six Shiites were lined up at a factory and gunned down in front of fellow workers, police said.

Three election officials were killed near Abu Ghraib.

Three airport employees were shot to death in a car in southern Baghdad. Gunmen killed three people leaving a Sunni mosque in the same neighborhood.

In Madrid, a court official said Wednesday that a judge had issued an international arrest warrant for three U.S. soldiers whose tank fired on a Baghdad hotel in April 2003, killing two cameramen, one from Spain and the other from Ukraine.

Judge Santiago Pedraz issued the warrant for Sgt. Shawn Gibson, Capt. Philip Wolford and Lt. Col. Philip DeCamp, all from the 3rd Infantry Division.

The Pentagon had no comment. U.S. officials have said the soldiers believed they were being shot at.