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Taliban kidnap two Red Cross officials: police chief

Taliban insurgents have kidnapped two foreign officials of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in the Afghan province of Wardak, the provincial police chief said yesterday.

"This much I know, that two Red Cross staff were kidnapped by the Taliban in the Salar district yesterday," Wardak police chief General Ewaz Muslimyar said. "We had asked them if they wanted a police escort, but they refused."

A spokeswoman for the ICRC in Kabul said four staff had traveled to Wardak, southwest of Kabul, on Wednesday, but had not returned. She declined to say if they had been kidnapped.

"The information I have is that four of our colleagues, two expatriates and two Afghan nationals, were coming back from Wardak to Kabul yesterday but they couldn't make it," said the spokeswoman, who declined to be named.

"We have lost contact with our staff since yesterday, there might have been complications on the way," she said.

Taliban rebels kidnapped two German engineers in Wardak in July and killed one after he suffered a heart attack. The other German is still being held.

Last month the ICRC helped facilitate talks between the Taliban and South Korean officials that led to the release of 19 hostages after more than a month of captivity.

Meanwhile, a man claiming to be the Taliban spokesman that Afghan authorities said they have captured yesterday denied it by telephone.

"I've not been arrested," spokesman Qari Yousef Ahmadi said, disputing an Interior Ministry statement that he had been captured in southern Helmand Province on Wednesday.

"I don't know if they arrested some innocent villager with the same name," he said.

Ahmadi called a reporter with whom he has frequent phone contact. The reporter recognized the voice as Ahmadi's.

The Interior Ministry said yesterday it had arrested the Taliban spokesman, who has been one of the most public voices for the fundamentalist insurgency.

Ahmadi was taken into custody with his brother during a police operation on Wednesday in the village of Sufiyan in the southern province of Helmand, the ministry said in a statement.

Ahmadi was the first person many journalists contacted for Taliban comment on violence and kidnappings in Afghanistan.

As the Taliban has stepped up its insurgency against foreign troops and the Western-backed government of President Hamid Karzai in the past several years, it has made increasingly sophisticated efforts to communicate with the media.

But it remains virtually impossible to confirm the identity of Taliban spokesmen because they do not appear in public and communicate only by phone or text message.

There was no response to calls to Ahmadi after the government announced his arrest yesterday morning. His phones appeared to be turned off.

But a reporter received a text message from Ahmadi's phone at 5:23am yesterday saying a Taliban attack on a police checkpoint in Uruzgan Province had killed three.
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