British national dies in Kabul gun attack

The shooting of a British development worker in a night-time attack in downtown Kabul has ended a month long lull in violent incidents in the Afghan capital.

Steven Blair MacQueen, aged 41, who worked as an adviser to Afghanistan’s rural development ministry, was killed as he drove a pickup truck through Kabul yesterday.

The attack happened in front of the main guest house for UN workers in Kabul and the Dutch Embassy, General Sher Agha, a Kabul police commander, said.

The British Embassy confirmed the incident, and said Mr MacQueen’s next of kin had been informed and were being provided consular assistance. The motive for the shooting was unclear.

Since holding its first direct presidential elections in October, Afghanistan has enjoyed a period of relative calm, marked by a decline in attacks by Taliban and al-Qaida insurgents that have plagued restive areas of the south and east.

But in November, three foreign election workers were kidnapped in Kabul by a Taliban splinter group. They were released unharmed a month later.

In December, a Turkish engineer working on a US-sponsored road project was kidnapped and killed by unidentified kidnappers in eastern Kunar province.

Although the three years since the ousting of the Taliban has seen numerous attacks on aid workers in the countryside, there have been few attacks against foreigners in the capital, which is patrolled by thousands of NATO peacekeepers.

The bloodiest incidents targeting foreigners in the past year were a car bomb explosion in August outside the office of a US security company that provides bodyguards for President Hamid Karzai, killing about 10 people.

In October, a suicide attacker killed an American translator and an Afghan girl on a market street popular with foreigners by detonating grenades attached to his own body.