KABUL, April 16, (Agencies): The United Nations said five of its Afghan employees were missing Friday amid reports their vehicles were hijacked in the same northern province where fierce fighting killed four German soldiers and three Afghan police the previous day.
Word of the UN workers’ disappearance in Baghlan province followed twin bombings Thursday targeting foreign companies in the southern city of Kandahar that killed at least three people.
A Baghlan police official said the UN employees had been kidnapped by Taleban insurgents. Dan McNorton, a spokesman for the world body in Kabul, said only that the five Afghans, who worked for the UN Office for Project Services, were missing.
“The UN is working with the Afghan authorities to ascertain their current whereabouts and the exact circumstances of the situation,” McNorton said.
Baghlan’s deputy police chief, Zalmay Mangal, said Taleban operatives hijacked the workers’ vehicles Thursday and the UN employees were being held in Dahana-i-Ghori district of Baghlan province. Afghan police have asked tribal elders in the area to help ensure the workers’ safety, he said.
Baghlan, about 120 miles (190 kilometers) north of the capital, was the site of intense fighting Thursday between international forces and Taleban militants.
The Thursday night attacks on a hotel and compound housing foreign companies in Kandahar showed enduring gaps in security despite a boost in police deployments and traffic checkpoints. The Taleban maintains a visible presence in large swaths of the region and parts of the city remain no-go areas for security forces, especially after dark.
Three people, all Afghans, were killed in Thursday night’s attack in which a suicide bomber detonated his explosives-laden vehicle at the inner security barrier of a compound shared by several Western companies.
Another 26 people were injured, 10 of them foreigners, including three Americans and a South African, Kandahar’s provincial governor Tooryalai Wesa told reporters on Friday. He said he didn’t know the nationalities of the other foreigners.
An initial report Thursday said three foreigners had been killed in the attack, but Wesa said that was not true and there was no corroboration that any foreigners had died.
NATO said 10 of the wounded were evacuated to its hospital in Kandahar, but gave no information on their nationalities or medical status.
Charity
The Italian medical charity Emergency on Friday said three employees held in Afghanistan over an alleged assassination plot were innocent, charging that they were victims of a bid to “discredit” the group.
“They are innocent. They are absolutely innocent,” Emergency founder Gino Strada told foreign journalists.
None has spoken to their families, to Emergency or to lawyers and there is no indication of their “juridical position”, said Strada’s daughter Cecilia, the charity’s president.
“An action to discredit us is certainly taking place,” she charged.
Police arrested the trio along with six Afghan colleagues on April 10 after the discovery of suicide vests, home-made bombs, guns and ammunition in a raid at the hospital where they worked in the southern city of Lashkar Gah.
The governor of Helmand province, Gulab Mangal, said the three — Emergency’s medical coordinator in Afghanistan, a surgeon and a logistical technician — were part of a plot to kill him bankrolled by the Pakistani Taleban.
The Italian ambassador and Rome’s special envoy to the region met the three in a prison near Kabul and said that they were in good health.
On Wednesday, the Italian government criticised Afghan authorities’ handling of the affair.
“We are not satisfied by the Afghan authorities’ response,” Foreign Minister Franco Frattini told parliament’s foreign affairs committee.