LONDON - Britain's top-secret crisis unit is expected to meet for a second straight day Wednesday as the government scrambles to secure the release of five Britons kidnapped in Baghdad in broad daylight.
Men wearing police uniforms abducted the group -- four private security guards and the management consultant they were guarding -- at gunpoint Tuesday morning from a finance ministry building in the heart of the Iraqi capital.
The British government's Cobra committee, which can feature senior ministers and intelligence chiefs and meets on occasions such as the July 2005 London suicide bombings, was likely to convene again Wednesday, officials said.
"On previous occasions, it meets on at least a daily basis," a Foreign Office spokesman told AFP.
"We're working hard on the ground, we're liaising with the Iraqi authorities... We have to just monitor things very closely.
"We have to establish the facts and there will be all sorts of decisions taken."
Prime Minister Tony Blair is on a farewell tour of Africa and a spokeswoman for his office said he was "fully aware" of what was happening, but would not comment on whether he had joined Tuesday's Cobra meeting remotely.
Blair told reporters Tuesday in the Libyan coastal town of Sirte, where he held talks with Libyan leader Moamer Kadhafi, that Britain would do "everything we possibly can to help."
Analysts have said Cobra would probably be discussing contingency plans for a military rescue mission but this has not been confirmed and the unit's deliberations are a tightly guarded secret.
The Foreign Office spokesman could not comment on a report in the Daily Telegraph that the elite SAS commando unit, which specialises in such rescues, was on standby.
The SAS rescued British peace activist Norman Kember and two Canadian colleagues, James Loney and Harmeet Singh Sooden, after they were taken captive by an Islamist group in 2006.
Along with fellow Brits Margaret Hassan, an aid worker who was killed in 2004 and Ken Bigley, an engineer murdered the same year, Kember was one of the highest-profile kidnap cases in Iraq in recent years.
Andy Bearpark, director general of the British Association of Private Security Companies, a trade organisation, told Sky News television Tuesday that many people had thought such "tragic cases" had stopped happening.
"The most worrying thing is the way the people were wearing police uniforms -- if you can't tell friend from foe, that makes risk even riskier," he said.
Four of the five Britons were employees of Garda, a Canadian security firm.
According to its website, Garda provides physical security, consulting and investigations, pre-employment screening, and cash handling with operations in North America, Europe and the Middle East and has 50,000 employees worldwide.
The Times newspaper reported Wednesday that a Basra-based commander from the Mahdi Army, a powerful Shiite militia led by influential cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, had claimed responsibility for the kidnap.
"We will take revenge on the British. It is not just this operation but there will be more and bigger operations," it quoted commander Abu Hussein as saying.
But it also said that Mahdi Army commanders in Baghdad had denied the militia had any involvement.
05/30/2007 01:55 GMT