All five Westerners kidnapped two days ago in southern Iraq are 'still held captive' with none of the hostages found dead or rescued as reported earlier, a top Iraqi police official said on Saturday.
"We have not rescued anybody and nobody has been found killed as reported yesterday. All the five are still missing and held captive," Ali al-Mussawi, chief of operations at the police headquarters of Basra, the southern Iraqi city, told AFP.
On Friday a Basra provincial official said that two American hostages had been rescued in a police raid and that one was found dead.
"Iraqi police found the body of an American where they conducted a raid in which two other Americans were freed," the official said.
Militiamen disguised as police officers seized the five Westerners -- four US citizens and an Austrian -- as they guarded a convoy of trucks from Kuwait that were stopped at "what appeared to be a police checkpoint near Safwan", a senior US official told AFP on Friday.
Their employer, the Kuwait-based Crescent Security Group, said it was unaware of the fate of the Westerners.
"We have not received confirmation from the coalition forces that the two people released or the one killed are with our company," a company spokesman said on Friday.
On Saturday the British military, which is deployed in southern Iraq, said it too had no information on the hostages and that its troops were helping Iraqi forces to track them down.
"We are gathering intelligence to trace them," British military spokesman Lieutenant Commander Mike Baker said.