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.
‘CROSSING THE LINE’: China’s embassy in Seoul criticized US Forces Korea Commander General Xavier Brunson, asking if his ‘hostile’ remarks were authorized by Washington South Korea and the US are in talks over recent public remarks by the commander of US Forces Korea, Seoul’s presidential office said yesterday, after the comments drew sharp criticism from China. In a recent podcast interview, US Forces Korea Commander General Xavier Brunson described South Korea as “the dagger in the heart of Asia” from China’s east coast, prompting the Chinese embassy in Seoul to say that he had “truly crossed the line.” The interview came amid growing speculation that Washington might seek to expand the role of US Forces Korea in countering the growing regional influence of China, a key
Through the noise of rushing papers and whirring belts at a print factory in Kyoto, two creators watch their photo essay come to life in broadsheet form — part of an effort to win new audiences in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). Despite the decline of the publishing industry, self-publication and handmade “zine” magazines are growing in popularity in Japan, reflecting the nation’s enduring love of paper in the digital era. While speaking to Agence France-Presse at the plant, his hands black with ink, one of the creators, Kazuma Obara, said: “I think [paper] is a medium that engages all five
Australian researchers have trained lab-grown brain cells on a silicon computer chip to play the 1990s shooter game Doom and said they are just scratching the surface of what the neurons could be capable of doing. It is the science-fiction work of biotech boffins at Cortical Labs, who researched and developed the technology that harnesses the workings of the brain’s networking system. Each so-called “biological computer” contains about 200,000 living human brain cells, grown from stem cells that were harvested from blood donations. Having mastered the simple computer game Pong, where a paddle is moved up and down to send a ball
France experienced its hottest spring on record, the French weather service said on Tuesday, after an exceptional early heat wave that also broke highs for the season in England and Wales. Meteo-France said the average nationwide temperature over March to May was 13.8°C — about 1.7°C above the norm, and surpassing records set in 2011 and 2020. “The warmest spring since records began in 1900,” it said in a bulletin. All three months were warmer than average, but the onset of an “unprecedented heatwave” late last month pushed the mercury to highs typically seen at the height of the summer. “Our country had never
RSS