Gunmen kidnap Afghan govt adviser in Pakistan
Afghan children look at the place where a Western aid worker was kidnapped yesterday. Unidentified gunmen abducted a Western aid worker in a street in the Afghan capital and shot dead an Afghan who tried to rescue him, the government said. Photo: AFP
Gunmen have kidnapped an Afghan government official as he was visiting his in-laws in a Pakistani border town, police said yesterday.
Akhtar Kohistani, an adviser at the ministry of rural development, was whisked away from Chitral town late Sunday, hours after he arrived to see relatives in Pakistan, local police chief Sher Akbar told AFP.
Gunmen kidnapped a French aid worker off the street in Kabul yesterday and killed an intelligence agency employee who tried to stop the abduction, police said, the latest in a series of attacks against Westerners in the Afghan capital.
Three assailants tried to kidnap two French nationals, but after a scuffle they got away with only one, said Mohammad Daud Amin, a police commander in the neighbourhood where the abduction took place.
"A resident tried to prevent this kidnapping. A kidnapper opened fire and killed him. They were able to kidnap one Frenchman," Amin told The Associated Press.
The Interior Ministry identified the resident as the driver of the intelligence chief of Panjshir province.
The abductions were the latest in a series since Afghanistan's ambassador-designate to Pakistan, Abdul Khaliq Farahi, was kidnapped in Pakistan in September.
"Unknown people knocked at his door late Sunday, requesting to meet Kohistani," but as soon as he came out he was bundled into a car and taken away, the officer said.
"We are investigating the incident", which happened in a small village in the Darosh district of Chitral region, bordering the troubled Afghan province of Nuristan, he added.
Police were trying to identify the kidnappers, who could have come from Afghanistan. "He may have been taken to Afghanistan," the officer said.
No group has claimed responsibility and no demand has been received so far, police said.
Last Friday unidentified men kidnapped Zia ul-Haq, the brother of the Afghan revenue minister Anwar ul-Haq, who had been living in the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar, police said.
A professor of Jalalabad's Aryana University, Abdul Haq Danishmal, was abducted from the tribal Khyber region last week.
Police say there has been a surge in kidnapping for ransom in the troubled North West Frontier Province and the rugged tribal region, and blame mainly militant groups.
Meanwhile, unidentified men have kidnapped an Afghan minister's brother who has been living in Pakistan's northwestern border city of Peshawar, police said Sunday.
Zia ul-Haq, 45, was whisked away from his home in suburbs of the capital city of North West Frontier Province, where Taliban- and al-Qaeda-linked militants are active.
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