The team of five Iraqi-born Christians - including the Anglican lay pastor and his deputy - lost contact with church officials outside Iraq and relatives inside the country as they reached the notorious stretch of highway between Ramadi and Fallujah to the west of the capital.
"We haven't been able to find any traces for them," said Bishop Clive Handford, who is responsible for the Anglican Diocese in Cyprus and the Persian Gulf and has been closely involved in learning the fate of the missing Iraqis.
"We fear the worst. We presume they had been killed," he told the Associated Press in a telephone interview from Cyprus. He declined to speculate about whether the laymen might have been targeted because they were Christians.
The bishop said the five had attended a church meeting in Jordan and were in touch with church officials by telephone until they reached Ramadi.
"That was the last contact with had with them," he said. "They haven't arrived in their homes in Baghdad and had no contact with their families there."
"If they were killed, it will be a very serious blow," he said. "We have to consider who's there, within the existing congregation, will be able to lead the church."
He identified the missing as Maher Dakel, the lay pastor; his wife, Mona, who leads the women's section of the church; their son, Yehya; the church's pianist and music director, Firas Raad; the deputy lay pastor and their driver, whose names were not disclosed.
Bishop Handford said the Iraqi lay pastor, who was not baptized as an Anglican, had been hired recently to lead worship at St. George's Church, which reopened in Baghdad after the ouster of Saddam Hussein in 2003. He said the congregation, while small, was growing.
