Kidnappers seize Frenchman from Baghdad home

GUNMEN seized a French engineer from outside his home in Baghdad yesterday, beating their screaming victim as they dragged him to their getaway car.

It was the third kidnapping of westerners in Iraq in ten days, after a lull in abductions in recent months.

French and Iraqi officials identified him as Bernard Planche, an employee of a non-governmental organisation who worked at the Rusafa water treatment plant in eastern Baghdad.

In Paris, the French government confirmed Mr Planche's disappearance and said it was doing its best to secure his release - an assurance that the president, Jacques Chirac, also made to the victim's daughter, Isabelle Planche.

"All the services of the French government are fully mobilised to ensure his release as quickly as possible," said the prime minister, Dominique de Villepin.

The Frenchman was snatched by seven gunmen in two cars as he prepared to leave his home yesterday morning in the west Baghdad district of Mansour, police quoted witnesses as saying. Small pools of blood were left outside the gates of his house.

A neighbour said the gunmen hit a screaming Mr Planche as they dragged him away, while witnesses looked on helplessly.

"The whole neighbourhood watched and no-one did anything to help him," said the man, who declined to be named. "The Frenchman had his hands in the air and was screaming."

The kidnapping came as Iraq's interior minister, Bayan Jabr, said terror attacks in Iraq had fallen by 70 per cent and reported there had been no arrests of infiltrators from across the border with Syria for two weeks.

The US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, said people should be optimistic about the situation in Iraq and not judge progress based on the death toll or media reports alone.

"To be responsible, one needs to stop defining success in Iraq as the absence of terrorist attacks," Mr Rumsfeld said in remarks at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

He said Iraqis are more upbeat about their country because it was on an improved political path and on the road to fully fledged democracy.

Mr Rumsfeld also said that in the era of the 24-hour news reports, events in Iraq may be reported too quickly and without context, and at times with little substantiation. "A lie moves around the world at the speed of light," he said.