Gunmen kidnap 18 Turks in Iraq capital

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Baghdad - The officials said those kidnapped included three engineers as well as employees of the administrative department and labourers.

By AFP

Published: Wed 2 Sep 2015, 11:36 AM

Last updated: Wed 2 Sep 2015, 4:21 PM

Gunmen kidnapped at least 18 Turkish employees of a company building a football stadium in Baghdad on Wednesday, officials said, but it was not immediately clear who was holding them.
Dozens of Turks have been kidnapped in Iraq by the Daesh group over the past 18 months and later released, but the latest abductions took place in Sadr City, a stronghold of paramilitary forces.
“Eighteen Turkish citizens working for a construction company in Baghdad have been kidnapped,” Deputy Prime Minister Numan Kurtulmus told reporters.
“We are in close contact with the Iraqi (interior) ministry and hope the incident will end positively.”
An Iraqi police colonel said the Turks were kidnapped by black-clad gunmen in pickup trucks, and that authorities had formed a committee to investigate their abduction.
Turkish foreign ministry spokesman Tanju Bilgic said those seized were three engineers, an accountant and 14 workers.
“We have learnt that the Turkish workers had been separated from workers from other countries during the kidnapping and were specifically chosen,” he was quoted as saying by the state-run Anatolia news agency.
Nurol Insaat, a leading Turkish construction company, confirmed in a statement to AFP that its workers had been abducted in Baghdad and said that it had not yet received any ransom demand.
Nurol’s website said it had been awarded a “design-build contract” for a 30,000-seat Sadr City Stadium, and that the project includes practice fields and a hotel.
Kidnappings for ransom are a persistent problem in Baghdad, and the identity of the kidnappers was not immediately clear.

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