NY Times
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October 29, 2004
KABUL
Gunmen Abduct 3 Foreign Election Aides in Afghanistan
By CARLOTTA GALL

ABUL, Afghanistan, Oct. 28 - Gunmen abducted three foreign election workers here Thursday in daylight on a busy street. It was the first such kidnapping of foreigners in Kabul, the capital, since the fall of the Taliban three years ago, and it raised fears that militant groups in Afghanistan might have borrowed a favored tactic of insurgents in Iraq.

A group linked to the Taliban, calling itself Jaish-e-Muslimeen, or Army of Muslims, claimed responsibility for kidnapping the foreigners in telephone calls to Reuters and Al Jazeera, the Arabic-language television network, in neighboring Pakistan. The caller, who identified himself as Mullah Ishaq Manzoor, said his forces had abducted the three.

"The three foreigners have been kidnapped by us," he told Reuters by satellite telephone. "We are taking them to some safe place outside Kabul." Al Jazeera quoted him as saying the group's council was meeting to decide the captives' fate.

As of late Thursday, no conditions had been set for their release.

The Afghan police said they had tracked the gunmen's black Toyota sport utility vehicle to an area west of Kabul and by afternoon had surrounded the area and begun a search. NATO helicopters circled over the city dropping antirocket flares, and armored vehicles moved into positions at street corners.

"It is possible they are armed thieves, and it is possible they are terrorists,'' said Lutfullah Mashal, an Interior Ministry spokesman. "The police are taking firm control of an area west of Kabul and we hope to arrest them as soon as possible and release those abducted."

The three foreigners - a Filipino man, a Kosovo Albanian woman and a woman from Northern Ireland - were working for the United Nations and Afghan election body, the Joint Election Management Board, that organized Afghanistan's first presidential elections on Oct. 9.

They were seized as the board announced that it had finished the two-week counting process and that about 100,000 outstanding ballots, still being investigated because of suspicions of fraud, would not change the overall result. President Hamid Karzai holds a commanding lead of 55.4 percent, some 39 percentage points over his nearest rival, Yunus Qanooni, the former education minister. The election took place under heavy security and with relatively little violence, although attacks, especially roadside explosions, attributed to people suspected of being members of the Taliban have flared since.

The three election workers were seized from their car at gunpoint shortly before 1 p.m. close to the compound where they worked in western Kabul. Three or four men with assault rifles overtook their car and forced it to a stop, said a truck driver, Ruhullah, 29, who was unloading cement by the side of the road and saw the kidnapping.

"They punched the driver twice and then pulled the women out, throwing them over their shoulders and carrying them to their own car," he said. The third foreigner, a man, struggled with the gunmen before he was put into the car, he said. Then they drove off into the maze of busy streets, their vehicle with its blackened windows, like so many government vehicles, making a swift getaway.

"They escaped toward the west side of Kabul, towards Araghandeh and Paghman, then the car disappeared into the villages west of Kabul," Mr. Mashal, the Interior Ministry spokesman, said. "Many troops from the national police are surrounding the area where they probably are."

"The car had black windows and still we cannot say if they are linked with terrorist groups, but whoever they are they are the enemies of peace and stability in Afghanistan and they are people who do not see benefit for themselves in peace," he said.

In Manila, the Philippine Foreign Affairs office said Angelito Nayan, a foreign service officer attached to the United Nations electoral body, had been seized, Reuters reported.

Jack Straw, the British foreign secretary, confirmed that a woman with dual British and Irish citizenship was among the three kidnapped, Agence France-Presse reported.

The kidnapping was the third incident directed at foreigners in the capital in the last two months. Last Saturday, a suicide bomber killed an Afghan girl and an American woman on a busy tourist shopping street, and on Aug. 29 a car bomb killed at least 10 people, including three American security contractors