Iraq arrests over missing Britons

Baghdad's Sadr City is a predominantly Shia neighbourhood

The US military in Iraq says it has captured three suspected Shia fighters believed to have been responsible for kidnapping five Britons in May.

The three were held without shots being fired in a pre-dawn raid on Saturday in the Sadr City district of Baghdad.

A computer expert and four security guards were abducted from the Iraqi finance ministry by armed men dressed as police on 29 May.

Few details have emerged about their detention since.

Failed operations

The BBC's Jon Brain in Baghdad says the UK Foreign Office has asked the media not to disclose their names, and details of the efforts to free them have been as hazy as the circumstances in which they were taken.

The top US commander in Iraq, Gen David Petraeus, admitted in June that several operations to release the men had ended in failure.

It is still not known why the men were kidnapped, and their captors have never issued a statement nor made any public demands.

The three men detained on Saturday were held on suspicion of belonging to "special groups" - a term the US military uses to denote Shia cells tasked with kidnapping and smuggling.

The US says the groups are linked to Iran's Revolutionary Guards and the Mehdi Army militia of radical cleric Moqtada Sadr.

The four kidnapped security guards were working for Canadian-owned security firm GardaWorld.

The fifth person works for a US management consultancy, BearingPoint.

They were abducted by a group of about 40 men.