Dressed As Arabs, U.K. Troops Nabbed For Setting Bombs & Shooting Iraqi Cops

"Two U.K. military personnel have been detained and we are liaising with the Iraqi authorities on this matter."

An Iraqi official in Basra said the British military had informed him the detained men were undercover soldiers.

"They were driving a civilian car and were dressed in civilian clothes when a shooting took place between them and Iraqi patrols," the official told Reuters.

The Washington Post adds a new twist: Iraqi officials in Basra say the British soldiers were arrested for planting bombs.

How often is this kind of thing happening? Probably much more often than reported. It just so happened that photojournalists were in Basra where the insanity broke out:

Mohammed al-Abadi, an official in the Basra governorate, said the two men looked suspicious to police.

"A policeman approached them and then one of these guys fired at him. Then the police managed to capture them," Abadi told reporters.

"They refused to say what their mission was. They said they were British soldiers and (suggested) to ask their commander about their mission," he added.

Reuters Television footage showed the tank trying to reverse away from trouble after it came under attack, apparently from petrol bombs as a crowd gathered around it.

Within moments flames emerged from the top of the tank, after a furious crowd hurled petrol bombs, burning furniture and tyres at it.

One soldier climbed out of the vehicle's hatch and jumped clear of it, as the crowd pelted him with stones.

A witness said people drove through the streets of Basra with loudhailers demanding that the undercover Britons remain in detention and be sent to jail.

Basra, capital of the Shi'ite south, has been relatively stable compared with central Iraq, where Sunni Arab insurgents have killed thousands of Iraqi and U.S. troops, officials and civilians with suicide attacks, roadside bombs and shootings.

BBC also reports the arrest of the "undercover" British soldiers:

Two British soldiers have been arrested in the southern Iraq city of Basra, sparking clashes outside a police station where they are being held.

The men, said to have been under cover, reportedly exchanged fire with police after failing to stop at a checkpoint.

Two British tanks, sent to the police station where the soldiers are being held, were set alight in clashes.

Speaking of journalists in Basra, a reporter working for the New York Times was found murdered there, today.

In a separate development in Basra, an Iraqi working as a local reporter in Basra for the New York Times was found dead Monday after being kidnapped by masked men, sources close to his family said. Fakher Haider was found with his hands bound and a single gunshot wound to the head hours after having been seized at his home by four men who took him away in handcuffs, telling the family they wanted to interrogate him. The masked men did not identify themselves as police, the sources said.

The killing came a month after an American freelance journalist, Steven Vincent, was kidnapped and killed in Basra. He was working on a book about the city and had written an opinion piece for the New York Times in which he criticized Basra's security forces.

UPDATE: British tanks moved in and destroyed the Basra jail to break out the "undercover" U.K. soldiers.

In the process, they freed 150 Iraqi criminals held in the jail.

The Times of London reports:

The incident was one of the most bizarre tales to emerge from the Iraq since the US-led invasion of March 2003 - especially given the amount of time and money spent by the British Army training Iraq’s post-Saddam police force. Although Basra, where UK forces are headquartered, has been relatively calm compared to Baghdad, the southern city and its police force has reportedly come under the direct control of Shia Muslim militias.

An Iraqi official told the Reuters news agency that the two "undercover" British soldiers, who were travelling in a civilian car, were arrested this morning after clashing with Iraqi police. Reports said the soldiers killed one Iraqi policeman and wounded another.

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Many Iraqis already believe U.S. and U.K. forces are deliberately causing much of the violence in Iraq, including setting off explosives later blamed on "terrorist suicide bombers." Today's incident in Basra will only encourage such widespread suspicion.