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Exclusive Report: How a bid to kidnap Iranian security officials sparked a diplomatic crisis
By Patrick Cockburn
Published: 03 April 2007
A failed American attempt to abduct two senior Iranian security officers on an official visit to northern Iraq was the
starting pistol for a crisis that 10 weeks later led to Iranians seizing 15 British sailors and Marines.
Early on the morning of 11 January, helicopter-born US forces launched a surprise raid on a long-established Iranian
liaison office in the city of Arbil in Iraqi Kurdistan. They captured five relatively junior Iranian officials whom the
US accuses of being intelligence agents and still holds.
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