Two Italian women working with a humanitarian organisation have been abducted by armed men in Baghdad, according to reports.
Men with AK-47 assault rifles reportedly stormed a building housing humanitarian organisations, abducting the Italians and two Iraqis, including a woman.
A spokesman for the "Bridge to Baghdad" charity named the two staffers as Simona Pari and Simona Torretta.
The Bridge to Baghdad Web site says the group is a volunteer association established in 1991 after the end of the first Iraq war, to promote humanitarian aid to Iraq and fight an economic embargo imposed on the country when Saddam Hussein was president.