Kidnap Alert For Afghan Aid Teams

[David]

AP


International aid workers kept a low profile Friday after the brazen daylight kidnapping of three foreign U.N. election staff in Kabul.

Police arrested seven suspects and cordoned off an area west of Kabul, Interior Ministry spokesman Latfullah Mashal said. Three of the seven were armed men wearing military uniforms.

Mashal said that interrogations of the suspects had established no link to Thursday's kidnapping, and another government official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said some were arrested to see if they could provide any leads.

The three foreigners were abducted from a marked U.N. vehicle around midday Thursday. Two of the victims were women, one with joint British-Irish nationality, and one from Kosovo. The third was a male diplomat from the Philippines. All work for a joint U.N.-Afghan commission overseeing landmark presidential elections.

The abductions come a week after a suicide attack killed an American woman and an Afghan teenager in the normally secure Afghan capital and ahead of final results due in the historic Oct. 9 poll.

U.S.-backed interim leader Hamid Karzai, who looks set to become the nation's first president-elect, condemned the abduction as "a criminal act ... against the Afghan people, aimed at derailing the process of peace and prosperity."

A man claiming to speak for a Taliban splinter group, Jaish-al Muslimeen, said it was responsible for the kidnappings but offered no proof it was holding the three.

Staff of aid agencies were told to restrict all but essential movements around Kabul, which is patrolled by thousands of NATO peacekeepers, making it usually one of the safest places in the country.

"It's an ominous development," said Paul Barker of the aid group CARE International. "We've not seen this kind of incident in Kabul before and I think we are still trying to figure out if it is a new trend or a one-off. Until it's resolved, we won't really know."

The three were abducted about a half-mile from an election office in Kabul.

"The attackers passed the U.N. vehicle, pulled in front of it and cut it off, then jumped out of the vehicle with AK-47 assault rifles drawn," reports CBS News Correspondent Lara Logan. "The kidnappers then surrounded the vehicle, and forced the driver to lie face down on the ground as they took the hostages."

Mashal said the vehicle was seen heading toward Paghman, a district west of Kabul with a reputation for banditry.

He said authorities obtained the license number of the vehicle but had yet to trace its owner. The car had tinted windows ? something that requires a permit from the defense or interior ministries, he said.

In New York, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said the world body was hoping for the abductees' "immediate and unconditional release."

Late Thursday, Ishaq Manzoor, who claimed to speak for the Taliban splinter group, said it had staged the kidnapping and taken the three to a "safe place."

"We are checking their identities and we will demand that if their countries have forces in Afghanistan they should withdraw them," Manzoor told The Associated Press in Pakistan, speaking by satellite telephone.

About a half-dozen purported Taliban spokesmen call local and international media groups to make claims and take responsibility for attacks. Sometimes their claims prove false, and their links to the Taliban are impossible to verify.

Suspected Taliban rebels have kidnapped foreigners on several occasions during the past year in southern Afghanistan, but never in the capital.

About 1,000 people have died in political violence in Afghanistan this year, including more than 30 American soldiers. Still, it has not involved abductions or suicide attacks of the intensity seen in Iraq.

Much as in Iraq, the attacks on aid workers have forced some aid agencies out of Afghanistan. Medecins Sans Frontieres pulled out of the country after 24 years of work that spanned the Soviet invasion, the civil war, the Taliban era and the U.S. occupation.