Four Britons feared kidnapped in Iraq

The Foreign Office is looking into reports that four British security guards were among seven Westerners kidnapped in Iraq.

All seven, including three computer programmers thought to be German, were reportedly taken by gunmen wearing police uniforms from a finance ministry building in central Baghdad.

A Foreign Office spokeswoman could not confirm the reports but said: "We are urgently looking into reports that a group of Westerners has been kidnapped."

Police said the lecturers were German and they were seized from their cars outside the ministry building. They had no information on the bodyguards.

A witness said the lecturers had been giving finance ministry personnel a lecture on organising electronic contracts in a ministry building in Palestine Street. She said she believed they were Americans.

The witness said the gunmen had entered the lecture room shouting "where are the foreigners, where are the foreigners?"

A fourth lecturer escaped being abducted because he was sitting apart from his colleagues.

Meanwhile, two bomb blasts in Baghdad have killed 32 people.

A bomb blast in a parked bus in central Baghdad killed at least 22 people and wounded 55 others, police said.

The explosion was near a major intersection in Tayaran Square, a busy commercial area usually filled with markets.

Many day labourers, mostly poor Shias, also often wait in the area for work.

And at least ten people were killed and 15 wounded when a car bomb exploded in a busy market in southwestern Baghdad, police said.

Another police source put the death toll at five and 14 wounded in the blast in Amil district.