KABUL, 30 October 2004 — A breakaway Taleban group said yesterday it had abducted three foreign UN workers from Kabul because they assisted Afghanistan’s “fake election” and threatened to kill them if a rescue mission was launched. “Our group has captured the three foreign infidels and we are keeping them at a safe place. So far they are safe,” Mulla Mohammad Ishaq, a spokesman for the Jaishul-Muslimeen (Army of Muslims) group, told AFP by cell phone.
“But if any forces are used against us to free them, those forces will be responsible for whatever harm that will come to the lives of the hostages.” The UN workers — a British-Irish woman, a Kosovar woman and a Filipino diplomat — were pulled from their UN-marked car by armed men wearing military-style jackets and bundled into a black four-wheel drive on Thursday afternoon.
The four-wheel-drive was later seen speeding toward the Paghman valley, notorious for banditry and past kidnappings of Afghans. As Ishaq spoke, hundreds of Afghan police from a newly trained commando unit scoured the Paghman valley west of Kabul in a desperate hunt for the trio.
The abduction took place just as UN officials announced the end of the long vote count of Afghanistan’s first presidential election, which gave US-backed interim leader Hamid Karzai an overwhelming victory.
Ishaq said the abductors had originally targeted 25 election workers. “There were 25 people that we targeted but we got only three. They all had come to support the infidel forces,” he said.
“They helped the holding of fake elections in our Islamic country to support the infidels’ puppet (Karzai) to fool the people of Afghanistan. He vowed more “jihad” (holy war) against “these infidels.”
Ishaq said Jaishul-Muslimeen’s members included former Taleban fighters, but was not part of the Taleban, which US-led forces ousted from power in late 2001. The group’s leader was a commander named Syed Akbar Agha, he said. Intelligence officials had earlier identified Jaishul-Muslimeen as a new military wing of the Taleban regime.
Karzai, whose election victory was still days away from being announced, condemned the abduction as “an act of enmity against the Afghan people aimed at derailing the process of peace and prosperity.” Karzai’s chief rival, Yunus Qanuni, who polled a distant second to Karzai, had no comment, his spokesman said. The daylight abductions, the first of their kind in Kabul, sparked fears of copycat Iraq-style kidnappings in Afghanistan. UN and international aid agencies ordered their expatriate employees to stay indoors yesterday.
The attack is the third on foreigners in Kabul in two months, falling just five days after a purported Taleban suicide bomber struck Kabul’s famous Chicken Street, killing an American woman and Afghan girl and injuring three Icelandic peacekeepers.
Some 500 newly trained Afghan police commandos from the “quick reaction force” were deployed to hunt through Paghman valley, 30 kilometers west of Kabul, Interior Ministry spokesman Lutfullah Mashal said.
They arrested three suspects late Thursday in Kabul. “They were wearing illegal military uniforms and they were carrying illegal weapons. From their features they look quite similar to the eyewitness descriptions,” Mashal told AFP.
