Authorities were seeking yesterday to identify eight foreign medics gunned down in a remote Afghan forest in an attack claimed by the Taliban which said they were executed as “Christian missionaries.”
The bullet-riddled bodies of five men, all US citizens and three women, an American, a German and a Briton, were found in the northeastern province of Badakhshan on Friday, according to the provincial police chief.
Two Afghans were also killed in the attack but two survived.
They were part of a 12-member team of volunteer medics returning from a medical camp in neighboring Nuristan Province, said Dirk Frans, director of the Kabul-based International Assistance Mission (IAM).
Badakhshan provincial police chief Aqa Noor Kintoz said the group had been lined up and shot, according to the testimony of one of the Afghan survivors.
“They were confronted by a group of armed men who lined them up and shot them. Their money and belongings were all stolen,” Kintoz said.
Despite the Taliban claim, Frans said police had told him robbery was the likely motive for the killings.
He said the group had been in a four-wheel-drive vehicle, driving through Badakhshan, where there have been few insurgent attacks.
“They had no guns and no security because we come at the communities’ invitation and they take care of us,” Frans said.
Northeast Afghanistan has been considered largely free of the Taliban-led insurgency in other parts of the country.
Kintoz said local villagers had warned the group not to enter the forested area, but they had insisted they would be safe because they were doctors, according to testimony from an Afghan survivor named Saifullah, who is said to have escaped death by reading verses of the Koran, prompting the men to realize he was a Muslim and release him in Nuristan.
The last communication with the group was on Wednesday evening, Frans said.
“There has never been any threats against us. If there were threats, we would not have gone,” he said, adding that IAM would continue its activities.
“We have been working under the king, the communists and the Taliban, and they know what we do,” he said.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for the killings.
“Yesterday at around 8am, one of our patrols confronted a group of foreigners. They were Christian missionaries and we killed them all,” Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahed said on Saturday.
Frans denied the Taliban claim that the group carried Bibles in the local language Dari.
The British, German and American authorities said they were working to identify the victims.
IAM said the Briton was Karen Woo, a 36-year-old doctor thought to have quit her job with a private healthcare firm in London to work in Afghanistan. British media said she had been due to get married in two weeks’ time.
Woo had written on the charity’s blog that she would be acting as the team doctor and running mother and child clinics.
“The expedition will require a lot of physical and mental resolve and will not be without risk but ultimately, I believe that the provision of medical treatment is of fundamental importance and that the effort is worth it in order to assist those that need it most,” she wrote.
The German government said it believed one of its nationals was killed “according to the information available.”
It called for a full inquiry into the attack and the punishment of those responsible.
The US embassy in Kabul said it could not confirm the number of US fatalities but said it had reports of “several” US citizens among them.
A Western official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the US embassy would be organizing the return of the bodies to Kabul where they would be formally identified.
IAM said it has been operating in the country since 1966, providing eye care to Afghans, running eye hospitals in Kabul, Herat, Mazar-i-Sharif and Kandahar.
In May the Afghan government suspended two Christian aid organizations — Church Aid of Norway and Church World Service of the US — after a television show reported they were proselytizing, which is illegal in the Islamic country.
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