KABUL, 29 October 2004 — Three foreigners helping to organize Afghanistan’s first presidential election were kidnapped by armed men in Kabul yesterday, triggering fears that militants were copying tactics used by insurgents in Iraq. Government and election officials said the three — including two women — were snatched from a UN vehicle as they were being driven from work during peak lunchtime traffic.
Afghan police and international peacekeepers immediately launched a massive security sweep of the capital. Helicopters circled the city and roadblocks were set up on roads leading out. “At about lunchtime today ... three international colleagues working in the electoral secretariat were abducted,” said Manoel de Almeida e Silva, spokesman for the United Nations in Afghanistan.
The three were a Filipino diplomat seconded to the United Nations, a woman with dual British and Irish citizenship and a woman from Kosovo. Witnesses said they saw up to seven armed men stop a UN vehicle, beat the Afghan driver and push the three at gunpoint into a four-wheel-drive pickup truck with tinted windows.
“I saw four men wearing camouflage push them into their black Surf (a type of car),” said witness Sher Afghan. The snatch took place in one of war-ravaged Kabul’s better neighborhoods, close to the Intercontinental Hotel. Suspicion for the kidnappings fell immediately on guerrillas owing allegiance to the Taleban regime that a US-led coalition helped overthrow in November 2001, but a spokesman for the Islamic group said he had no immediate knowledge of the incident.
However, Mulla Ishaq Manzoor, commander of a breakaway Taleban faction known as the Jaish-e-Muslimeen (Army of Muslims), claimed his group had carried out the abduction. “The three foreigners have been kidnapped by us,” he told Reuters by satellite telephone. “We are taking them to some safe place outside Kabul”.
The kidnappings stirred fears among the 2,000-plus foreign civilian community in Kabul that militants had switched tactics in their insurgency after suffering a series of setbacks in recent months. Analysts say the Taleban’s morale has been hurt by the high turnout in the Oct. 9 election, and its inability to sabotage the vote or prevent large numbers of people from casting ballots.
“This is completely different. It might be copy cat...they could have learned it from TV,” said Nick Downie of the Afghanistan NGO security offices. Although foreigners have frequently been targeted since the Taleban were ousted, the kidnappings are believed to be the first in Kabul and follow a series of snatchings and bloody beheadings by Islamic militants in Iraq.
The group responsible for most of the Iraq abductions and murders, led by Jordanian militant Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, last week pledged allegiance to Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda network, which planned the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on US cities from bases in Afghanistan.
In Manila, the Philippine Foreign Affairs Office named the kidnapped Filipino as Angelito Nayan, a foreign service officer seconded to the UN electoral body. “The department has informed Angelito’s family of the incident and joins them and the rest of the Filipino people in prayer for the success of the efforts to secure the safe release of Angelito and his co-workers,” a spokesman said. British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw confirmed one of the kidnapped women was a dual British-Irish national. “We are in touch with the family. It is a somber context in which to look at the challenges ahead for Afghanistan,” he said.
Afghan and international peacekeepers launched a huge manhunt immediately after news of the kidnapping broke. But the inadequacies of Afghan’s fledgling security apparatus were quickly exposed. At the scene of the kidnapping, police looked on as onlookers and reporters crowded round the UN car, obliterating any forensic evidence such as fingerprints.
After a period of calm during the election, an American woman and Afghan child were killed last Saturday by a suicide bomber in a busy shopping street in the centre of the capital. The kidnappings come the same day that the United Nations-Afghan Joint Electoral Management Body — for whom the three foreigners worked — announced that it had finished counting votes. Although the results are not yet official, incumbent Hamid Karzai easily won with more than 55 percent of the ballot.
