LONDON, Oct 9, (AFP): A British female aid worker kidnapped in eastern Afghanistan a fortnight ago was killed by her captors during a botched attempt to rescue her, British Foreign Secretary William Hague said Saturday. Hague expressed “deep sadness” at the death of Linda Norgrove, 36, but defended the rescue bid, insisting that Britain and its NATO forces had judged it her “best chance” of surviving the ordeal. The raid was carried out on Friday night by US troops acting as part of an international operation, a British government source told AFP.

US development group DAI, who had employed Norgrove as regional director for a US-funded aid project in the eastern town of Jalalabad since February, said it was “saddened beyond words” at her death. Three local DAI staff were seized with her on September 26 in nearby Kunar province, a hotbed of Taleban activity near the Pakistan border, but Western aid sources in Afghanistan said they were released a week after the attack. “It is with deep sadness that I must confirm that Linda Norgrove, the British aid worker who had been held hostage in eastern Afghanistan since 26 September, was killed at the hands of her captors in the course of a rescue attempt last night (Friday),” Hague said in a statement.

According to an Afghan intelligence official, the rescue team was closing in on the house where Norgrove was being held when her captors threw a grenade into the room where she was kept, killing her. The troops opened fire and killed all the captors, the official told AFP on condition of anonymity. “Responsibility for this tragic outcome rests squarely with the hostage takers,” Hague said. “From the moment they took her, her life was under grave threat. Given who held her, and the danger she was in, we judged that Linda’s best chance lay in attempting to rescue her.” He thanked Britain’s NATO allies and the Afghan authorities and security forces for their help, adding: “Hostage-taking is never justified and the UK does not make concessions to hostage-takers

“But whenever British nationals are kidnapped, we and our allies will do everything in our power to free them.” Norgrove’s death comes just weeks after British doctor Karen Woo was shot dead in northeastern Afghanistan alongside seven other foreign aid workers. Last year, British commandos rescued a British-Irish journalist Stephen Farrell in a dramatic airborne operation in Kunduz, but his Afghan colleague Sultan Munadi was killed in the ensuing firefight. General David Petraeus, who commands US and NATO troops fighting the Taleban in Afghanistan, said: “Afghan and coalition security forces did everything in their power to rescue Linda.”

US forces form the bulk of about 150,000 international troops fighting insurgents in Afghanistan following the 2001 invasion, while Britain has about 10,000 soldiers there.
Norgrove was an experienced aid worker, having worked in Afghanistan for several years with the United Nations before joining DAI this year.
The president of the aid group, James Boomgard, said her death was “devastating news” and offered his condolences to her parents, John and Lorna, and her younger sister Sofie, for their “terrible loss”.
“We are saddened beyond words by the death of a wonderful woman whose sole purpose in Afghanistan was to do good,” he said.
Norgrove was born in Scotland and travelled widely, studying in the United States, Mexico and Uganda before taking her first development job with the World Wildlife Fund in Peru.
She worked with the UN in Kabul for three years, where she learned Dari, and after a two-year stint in Laos, returned to Afghanistan in February.
A Taleban spokesman told AFP at the time that they did not know about her abduction, but it is not uncommon for them to deny responsibility in the early stages for operational reasons.

Italians
Four Italian soldiers were killed and a fifth seriously injured in Afghanistan when a bomb blew up their vehicle on Saturday, the defence ministry announced.
The soldiers were ambushed as they returned from a mission in the Gulistan valley in the southwestern province of Farah, General Massimo Fogari, head of the press service at the defence chief of staff told the television network Tg 24.
They were escorting a convoy of 70 civilian trucks and travelling in an armoured car which took the full force of the explosion of a powerful home-made bomb, the Italian news agency ANSA said.

“After the blast, the convoy came under fire until the attackers were forced to flee” by the military retaliating, Fogari said, adding that the attack was typical of the Taleban’s modus operandi.
The wounded soldier was evacuated by helicopter and said to be conscious despite suffering multiple injuries.
The zone where the attack happened is one of three places recently allocated to the control of Italian forces.
The deaths took to 34 the number of troops from Italy to die in Afghanistan since 2004, when Italian troops were deployed to the war-torn country as part of a NATO-led mission to confront a Taleban-led insurgency.
Foreign Minister Franco Frattini expressed his “deep pain” at the latest deaths, saying they were “another example of the very high human price which has to be paid for a mission fundamental for national security.”
He said Italy was “totally committed to the new transition phase in international strategy in Afghanistan being worked out at the NATO summit in November.”

He said he also wanted to see “the taking of responsibility for security matters and control of territory by Afghan forces speeded up, province by province.”
Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi issued a statement expressing his pain “at this tragic ambush.”
Italy has about 3,400 soldiers in Afghanistan, most of them in the west of the country. The deployment is set to grow to 4,000 soldiers by the end of the year.
The latest deaths took the number of foreign troops killed this year in the conflict to 572, according to a toll complied by AFP from the independent Internet site icasualties.org.
The first nine months of 2010 have been the deadliest for international troops since a US-led international coalition chased the Taleban from power in late 2001.
The toll of 521 dead for 2009 had already made it by far and away the bloodiest year in the conflict, which has escalated markedly in the past three years.