ONE of the wealthiest bankers in Iraq has been kidnapped during an audacious raid that left his five bodyguards dead, murdered by single gunshots to the head in the garden of a rented villa in western Baghdad.

Ghalib Abdul Hussein Kubba, the chairman of the al-Basra National Bank for Investment, was abducted with his son, Hassan, a senior employee at the bank, by up to a dozen gunmen. The kidnappers arrived at Mr Kubba’s house in the affluent Yarmouk district on Thursday evening in a minibus and two cars. They were dressed in the uniform of Iraqi National Guardsmen.

“They set up a checkpoint and sealed off the street,” Mustafa al-Tahi, 20, a neighbour, said. “We just thought it was an official raid, because they had everything: uniform, weapons, even night-vision goggles on their helmets. They moved and spoke like soldiers. Only their vehicles were non-military. They turned cars away from the street, told drivers to switch off their headlamps and ordered people inside.

“There was no gunfire. They left after a short time. There was silence for half an hour. No one knew what happened. Then came the sound of sirens. The police arrived. First they raided the wrong house, then they entered Kubba’s.”

Inside they found Mr Kubba’s wife, his son’s wife and his two grandchildren huddled and sobbing in a corner. In the front garden of the high-walled, two-storey villa lay the bodies of his security detail.

“They must have used silencers,” Corporal Mahmoud, a policeman, who lives nearby, said. “I was at home and didn’t hear a thing until I turned up on my shift and discovered what had happened — Kubba gone and five dead.”

The kidnapping is the latest in a trend that is already the scourge of Iraq and has resulted in thousands of Iraqis and hundreds of foreigners being taken hostage since the American-led invasion in 2003.

Mr Kubba joins a list that includes, at present, four Western peace activists — a Briton, Norman Kember, an American and two Canadians — Jill Carrol, an American journalist, and two German engineers.

According to the US military, calls to the Iraqi Interior Ministry’s kidnap hotline have jumped from nine a week in mid-December to 26 a week last month, and a report published by the Brookings Institute, an American think-tank, estimates that there were 30 Iraqi kidnappings a day in December, up from ten a day the same month a year previously.

The Iraqi Interior Ministry said that the numbers of those taken hostage include at least 425 foreign citizens and 5,000 Iraqis.

The links between organised crime, terrorist and insurgent groups, tribal feuds and top-level corruption have made kidnapping something akin to a national industry.

As Mr Kubba discovered, bodyguards are no guarantee of safety. Yarmouk, the affluent neighbourhood in western Baghdad from which Mr Kubba was seized, has been the scene of numerous abductions.

Originally a leading figure in the southern city of Basra, Mr Kubba rose to financial prominence through canny banking deals and big-business ventures, facilitated by his strong relationship with leading Baathist figures in the regime of Saddam Hussein. People in Basra allege that he was a close friend of Uday Hussein, Saddam’s gangster son. Yet in 2003, after the regime fell, Mr Kubba was appointed head of Basra’s interim council by the British. He became the president of Basra commerce, headed many local businesses and was a leading figure in the city’s al-Fadilah Islamic party.

One business associate described Mr Kubba as “a man with a black history — a different man for every day”.

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