  Ultra-high energy cosmic rays (UHECR) above an energy threshold of tens of
EeV might undergo only small deflections due to interstellar magnetic fields.
Their arrival directions would then point to regions of possible hadronic
acceleration processes, which are likely to be also sources of high energy
neutrinos. To search for such cosmic accelerators, we present here the first
high statistics analysis of directional correlations between neutrino
candidates from the IceCube Observatory and UHECR events. Data taken with
IceCube in a configuration of 22 strings provided the basis for using published
events from both the Pierre Auger Observatory and the HiRes experiment as
reference directions in a search for coincidences with neutrinos. The analysis
was optimized according to strict blindness criteria and showed an excess of
neutrino candidates close to UHECR directions with a probability of 1% to occur
as a random fluctuation, consistent with a background-only hypothesis. An
extension of this analysis to include newer IceCube data, taken with 40 strings
and using a likelihood approach, is discussed in the outlook.
