(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-04-06 19:26

BAGHDAD  - A group of at least 40 students kidnapped by gunmen on Sunday near the northern city of Mosul have been freed by Iraqi security forces, police said.

Iraqi soldiers from the 6th Iraqi Army Division stand guard on a road in Baghdad April 5, 2008. Gunmen kidnapped 42 university students near the northern Iraqi city of Mosul on Sunday, police said, in one of the biggest mass abductions in the country in many months. [Agencies]

"The kidnapped students have been freed by the Iraqi army and police," said Brigadier-General Khalid Abdul-Sattar, security spokesman in Iraq's Nineveh province, where Mosul, Iraq's third largest city, lies.

Earlier, he said 42 male university students had been seized, one of the biggest mass abductions since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. He later said the total number of students captured had been 40.

The gunmen had set up a fake checkpoint and stopped two buses in the village of al-Jirin full of students returning to classes after a weekend break. One of the buses escaped, police said, but male students from the other bus were loaded onto trucks and taken away.

Abdul-Sattar gave no details of the operation to free the students.

The kidnapping highlighted the continued violence in the north of the country after much focus on tensions in the largely Shi'ite south, where gunmen loyal to anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr clashed with government troops late last month.

No group has claimed responsibility for the kidnapping but suspicion will fall on Sunni Islamist al Qaeda, which has regrouped in northern provinces after being pushed out of western Anbar province and Baghdad by a series of military offensives. The U.S. military says Mosul is al Qaeda's last major urban stronghold in Iraq.

Abductions, including occasional mass kidnappings, have been rampant during Iraq's descent into violence following the U.S.-led invasion to oust Saddam Hussein.

In November 2006 kidnappers snatched scores of people from the Higher Education Ministry and many are still officially missing. The following month gunmen seized about 30 Iraqis, mainly Red Crescent employees, in Baghdad. Most were released.

Militant groups have carried out kidnappings for political purposes, while criminal gangs have abducted people for ransom.

The Chaldean Archbishop of Mosul, Paulos Farraj Rahho, was kidnapped on February 29 by gunmen who killed his driver and two guards. The archbishop's body was found two weeks later despite appeals for his freedom from Pope Benedict.