WASHINGTON — Iran’s ambassador in Baghdad has accused America of having 36 Iranians in custody, a far higher number than previous counts of detained Iranians provided by American spokesmen. In an interview with ABC News in Baghdad yesterday, Hassan Kazemi Qomi, alluding to President Bush’s decision last month to target Iranian supply lines and saboteurs, said America is holding six Iranian diplomats and an additional 30 Iranian nationals.

A State Department official who requested anonymity did not dispute the number out of hand. “Iranians along with other foreign fighters may have been taken into custody in Iraq,” this official said. He did not verify the exact figure provided by Mr. Qomi.

The ambassador and his Foreign Ministry yesterday accused Americans of at least directing the abduction of a second secretary at their embassy, Jalal Sharafi. Echoing a criticism leveled by Iraq’s foreign minister, Mr. Qomi during his interview with ABC accused America of “turning Iraq into a stage for settling its own accounts with others at the cost of the Iraqi people.”

American officials denied knowing of any involvement in the abductions that occurred yesterday. The White House spokesman, Tony Snow, said the American government did not know all the facts. “We know that the Iraqi government is investigating,” he said.

In Baghdad, the Associated Press quoted Lieutenant Christopher Garver as saying, “We’ve checked with our units and it was not an MNF-I [Multi-National Forces — Iraq] unit that participated in that event.”

Some Shiite Iraqi lawmakers, however, suggested the abduction occurred under the auspices of an elite Iraqi intelligence unit supervised by American forces.

When asked about the abduction, two American intelligence officials yesterday said they had no information to corroborate that America was behind the events in the Corrada neighborhood of Baghdad. It is a heavily Shiite area controlled by the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a powerful Iraqi political party harbored in and partially funded by Iran between 1982 and 2003. The abduction of Mr. Sharafi occurs at a moment of high tension between Iran and America. On December 21, America raided a headquarters of the supreme council in Baghdad and detained a man said to be a senior Quds Force official who went by the name Chizari.

Chizari, who was traveling with diplomatic papers, was ultimately allowed to return to Iran. Less than three weeks later, American forces raided an Iranian outpost in the Kurdish city of Irbil. There, they first detained six men, and later let one of them go. American officials have insisted that the building was not, as the Iranians say, a consulate, and instead was a headquarters for Iran’s elite Quds Force, the unit of the country’s revolutionary guard responsible for anti-American and anti-Israel terrorism.

In this period however, American forces have captured more Iranians, according to an Iraqi official familiar with some of the recent operations.

On Monday, European diplomats confirmed that Iran had set up the first tranche of a planned 3,000 centrifuges for its uranium enrichment facility in Natanz. The 328 centrifuges mark the latest round of nuclear brinksmanship between Iran and the United Nations Security Council, which voted in December unanimously for mild sanctions against the country’s nuclear program. The decision to construct the centrifuges comes as a February 21 deadline approaches whereby the international community will review the sanctions it passed late last year. Also this week, the National Directorate of Intelligence sent back a second draft of slides for a public presentation originally scheduled for last week that would make public classified information that American officials aim to use to prove Iran has provided specialized explosives to Iraqi insurgents attacking American troops.

The White House rejected the first draft of the presentation out of concern that the evidence was not air-tight, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley told reporters Friday. One official familiar with the new draft said it would show photographs of exploded bombs and mortar with serial numbers and markings that trace them back to factories in Iran. The presentation originally also included mug shots and descriptions of Iranian operatives in Iraq and their affiliations to the country’s security services.

The question of whether the Iranian regime is knowingly sending weapons to insurgents remains hotly debated in the intelligence community. The classified National Intelligence Estimate last week included a dissent from some agencies arguing that Iran was playing a larger role in stoking the sectarian conflict that currently enflames Iraq.