9 Held by Iran in Clash, Iraq Says

Iraqi officials accused Iran on Tuesday of kidnapping nine coast guardsmen who were pursuing suspected oil smugglers in disputed territorial waters.

The Iraqi coast guard patrol saw the suspected smugglers stealing diesel fuel from an Iraqi pipeline in the Shatt al Arab waterway, said Mohammed Musabah Waily, the governor of the city of Basra in southern Iraq. The Iraqis were captured by Iranians as they gave chase, Waily said. Iran denies the incident took place.

Meanwhile, Iraqi authorities said 35 prospective police recruits were apparently captured Monday as they returned to Samarra from the Baghdad police academy. Police said a group of unidentified, armed men in several cars stopped a bus in which the recruits were riding.

The incident took place in a hotbed of insurgent activity and near the scene of a U.S. helicopter crash Monday that killed two soldiers. The cause of the crash is under investigation, but two insurgent groups have claimed responsibility.

The apparent clash along the Shatt al Arab involving the Iraqi coast guard patrol and Iranian boaters is a reminder of the delicate relations between the two countries that fought an eight-year war in the 1980s. Portions of the river separate Iran and Iraq, and it passes the Iranian port of Abadan before emptying into the Persian Gulf.

Abadan is considered a smugglers’ haven where a wide range of products are hustled into and out of Iraq. Smugglers have become especially adept at punching holes in and then siphoning oil or refined fuel from pipelines that run to docking facilities in the waterway and gulf.

Waily, the Basra governor, said the Iraqi patrol chased the smugglers’ boats toward Abadan on Monday night.

Iranian boats were called out, gunshots were fired and the Iraqi vessel was seized, Waily said. The governor also accused Iran of firing artillery shells into Iraq.

“We informed the government in Baghdad to handle the situation but did not receive any reply from them,” Waily said. He said he heard that one of the nine Iraqis was killed but told a TV reporter he could not confirm it.

A spokeswoman for Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari said Tuesday that the country had asked for the release of eight sailors and an officer taken prisoner by Iran. The spokeswoman said none of the nine had been killed. Iranian diplomats here, speaking to a Reuters reporter, denied the incident altogether.

Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari held a meeting Tuesday with the Iranian officials here to discuss the issue.

After decades of bitterness, hopes have risen that relations between the neighbors will improve after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, a Sunni Muslim, in 2003. Iran is controlled by Shiite Muslims, and the coalition government being formed in Baghdad also is dominated by Shiites.

Disputes are not uncommon along the border. Iran briefly seized three British naval patrol boats in the same area in 2004 before Iraq assumed responsibility for guarding its coast.

The missing police recruits were part of a contingent of 229 from Samarra that had been sent to the Baghdad academy under police guard, Samarra police chief Malik Khazragi said.

In other violence, Baghdad police sources reported that gunmen in the Karada neighborhood killed seven workers at a food services facility that supplies the Iraqi army with meals.

Also, four bodies were discovered in Rustamiya, southeast of Baghdad. The victims’ feet and hands had been bound and all were shot in the head and chest, execution-style, officials said. The area has been the scene of intense violence between Sunnis and Shiites, and more than 100 bodies have been found in similar circumstances over the last three months.

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Times special correspondent Othman Ghanim in Basra contributed to this report.