Topic: Official Taken Hostage, Later Freed

Miami Herald
January 20, 2008 Iraqi national security advisor Mowaffak al-Rubaie was briefly taken hostage and implied his captors were followers of renegade Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.
By Steve Lannen, McClatchy News Service
BAGHDAD -- A police raid Saturday on a Shiite Muslim mosque thought to be the headquarters of an extremist cult capped a weekend of violence in southern Iraq, while elsewhere, tensions between Iraq's Shiite-led government and renegade Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr escalated.
Iraq's national security advisor said he was briefly taken hostage Saturday in a Baghdad mosque and implied that his captors were Sadr supporters.
Mowaffak al-Rubaie was released only after Iraq's interior minister, who oversees the police, intervened.
In an e-mail to McClatchy Newspapers, Rubaie said that Sadr's followers ``used the same tactics that they used before on Abdul Majid al Khoei.''
Sadrists were accused of the 2003 fatal stabbing of Khoei, a moderate Shiite cleric who was considered a rival to Sadr.
A warrant for Sadr was issued in 2004, but it's never been executed, and he's denied any involvement.
On Friday, a spokesman for Sadr warned that the cleric might not extend a six-month cease-fire by his Mahdi Army.
In a statement, Salah al-Obeidi charged that rival Shiite militias have infiltrated Iraq's security forces and that some senior security officials remain in their jobs, although they've been charged with human-rights offenses.
''This will force us to reconsider the decision to extend the cease-fire,'' Obeidi said.
On Saturday, police attacked the booby-trapped mosque on the outskirts of Nasiriyah the day after its members attacked police in Basra and Nasiriyah, killing more than 100 people and injuring more than 200 in the two cities.
Elsewhere in Iraq, three suicide bombers attacked a police checkpoint in Ramadi, killing six police officers.
In western Iraq, a rocket killed seven people in Tal Afar on the Syrian border. Northeast of Baghdad in Diyala province, a roadside bomb killed three bodyguards of the provincial governor.
McClatchy Baghdad bureau chief Leila Fadel and McClatchy special correspondents Sahar Issa in Baghdad, Ali al-Basri in Basra and Qassem Zein in Najaf contributed to this report.