An American hostage was found dead and two others were rescued by police on Friday, a provincial official said, a day after they were kidnapped along with another two Westerners in southern Iraq.
"Iraqi police found the body of an American where they conducted a raid in which two other Americans were freed," an official with the provincial governorate of Iraq's southern city of Basra told AFP.
One US citizen and an Austrian are yet to be traced, following the raid in an area called Al-Dawajin in Zubair district, the official said.
The five security guards were kidnapped on Thursday near Safwan close to the Kuwaiti border as they escorted a convoy of 49 trucks.
Despite the report from the southern official, Crescent Security Group, the Kuwait-based company for which the five work, said it had no confirmation from the US-led coalition.
"We have not received confirmation from the coalition forces that the two people released or the one killed are with our company," a spokesman of the company told AFP in Kuwait City.
He said the company was in "direct contact" with the coalition forces and so far they had "not informed us of any new developments" regarding the five abducted employees.
Militiamen disguised as police officers seized the five as they guarded the convoy in the second reported major abduction in the violence-plagued country in three days.
They were abducted when the convoy of 43 trucks and six security vehicles stopped at "what appeared to be a police checkpoint near Safwan", a senior US official told AFP.
"Nineteen trucks and one security vehicle were taken by those posing as police."
The official said the kidnappers seized a total of 14 people but the Kuwait-based employers said that nine truck drivers were later released, leaving the five Westerners in captivity.
Earlier on Friday in an apparent abortive attempt to locate the five missing men, six other security guards illegally entered Iraq from Kuwait and clashed with Iraqi police.
One British guard was killed and another wounded in the gunfight that erupted, a police officer and the British military said.
Two women bystanders and two policemen were also killed.
Speaking from the town of Al-Zubair, the officer said the group of six was stopped by customs police and "clashed with them".
British military spokesman Lieutenant Commander Mike Baker told AFP that the wounded man was also British.
"He is wounded and at the moment is admitted in a British military hospital," Baker said by telephone from Basra. "He told us that he believes that another British guard was killed in the fight."
Baker said, however, that the clashes seem to have occurred when the six guards working for another private security company were escorting a convoy of "ambulances".
In another separate incident the British military said its forces killed two gunmen in Safwan who were believed to "be involved in terrorist activities".
Meanwhile police are searching for dozens of people still missing after a daylight raid by scores of gunmen wearing police uniforms, and believed to be militiamen, on a ministry building in Baghdad on Tuesday.
The gunmen raided a research institute in the capital, seizing higher education ministry staff and visitors.
Higher Education Minister Abed Dhiab al-Ujaili said on Thursday that some 75 hostages still remained captive, including 40 of his ministry's staff.
Citing freed hostages, Ujaili said that some captives had been killed and many tortured.
On Wednesday, government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh played down the kidnapping, insisting that only 39 people had been seized, of whom he said just two were still being held.
A warrant issued against the leader of the main Sunni clerics' organisation while he was out of the country threatened to further fan tensions between the Shia and the Sunni.
Harith Sulaiman al-Dhari, head of the Muslim Scholars' Association, "violated the anti-terror law and the warrant is to bring him back from wherever he is", interior ministry spokesman Major General Abdel Karim Khalaf told AFP.
The government spokesman said later that the warrant was not for Dhari's arrest but to open a criminal investigation into his activities.
Dhari dismissed the warrant as "illegal."
Speaking to reporters in neighbouring Jordan, he accused the Baghdad government of "provoking a crisis" to cover up its own failings, and vowed to return to Iraq "at the appropriate time".
He also told Dubai-based Al-Arabiya television that one reason for the measure against him was a recent visit to Saudi Arabia which "irked... some parties within the government".
Dhari's association called for calm but urged Sunni politicians "to pull out of parliament and the government", in a fresh threat to the hard-won Sunni Arab representation in the national unity administration.