CBS Journalists Kidnapped in Basra

A British photojournalist working for CBS News and his Iraqi translator were abducted from their hotel in Basra by a group of armed gunmen Sunday. Via BBC:

Two journalists working for the American network CBS are believed to have been kidnapped in southern Iraq.

Police and witnesses said they were seized from a hotel in the city of Basra by at least eight gunmen.

CBS released a statement saying the two were missing and that efforts were under way to find them.

The network did not name the journalists and it requested that others refrain from speculating on their identities.

"CBS News has been in touch with their families and asks that their privacy be respected," the statement added.

The journalists were taken from the Sultan Palace Hotel, police and witnesses said.

A member of staff was quoted as saying the gunmen had arrived at the hotel earlier in the day and inquired about who was staying there. They are said to have returned later in a four-wheel drive vehicle.

Other reports say the group were masked and carrying machine-guns.

The British journalist has been unofficially identified as Richard Butler (via Dinah Lord):

Richard Butler is a veteran journalist who has covered conflicts in the Middle East and Africa.

According to his personal website, Butler was one of the few freelance photographers inside Baghdad to photograph its fall in March 2003. Four months later he went to Liberia to cover the civil war.

He has been employed on assignment for the US magazine, Newsweek, in Afghanistan, searching for al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden with US forces, and worked in Sudan following rebels from the Sudanese Liberation Army.

His work has been featured extensively in US publications such as Time magazine and The New York Times, as well as British publications like The Sunday Telegraph and The Financial Times as well as Paris Match in France.

This is not good. Basra was recently handed over to Iraqi control after the British withdrew its troops last year. The New York Times reports that the two kidnapped men "were taken away in what appeared to be official police vehicles."

There has been a lot of bad blood between the British and the Iraqi police force in Basra in recent years. According to the Times:

In Basra, a recurrent source of terror among official police entities has been a bureau variously called the Serious Crimes Unit and the Major Crimes Unit. In September 2005, British forces were forced to storm a building where the unit was holding two British military officers who had apparently been working under cover in Basra.

About a year later, hundreds of British troops stormed and finally razed a station held by the unit, finding more than 100 Iraqis with signs of torture who were believed to have been marked for execution.

After the December 2006 raid, the Iraqi Police announced that they were no longer searching for 5 Crescent Security contractors who had been abducted near Basra in November 2006. Those men had been taken captive when their convoy was ambushed at a phony roadblock apparently manned by Iraqi police. In January 2007, another American contractor and his two Iraqi translators were kidnapped in the same area. The contractor has not been heard from since then; the two translators were found murdered the next day.

Prayers for the safety and swift rescue of Richard Butler and his translator, and for all the hostages in Iraq and the Middle East.

H/t The Jawa Report