Taliban kill one hostage

Taliban militants in Afghanistan today claimed they shot and killed one Korean hostage while a group of abductees was freed and taken to a US military base, officials said.

Purported Taliban spokesman Qari Yousef Ahmadi claimed that one of the hostages had been shot and killed and a police official said militants told him the hostage was sick and couldn’t walk and was therefore shot.

Some of the twenty three Korean hostages, meanwhile, had been freed and were taken to a US base in Ghazni, said two Western officials. The officials did not know how many had been freed. The South Korean news agency Yonhap said eight Koreans had been freed, citing unnamed Korean officials.

An Afghan official involved in the negotiations earlier said a large sum of money would be paid to free eight of the hostages.

Foreign governments are suspected to have paid for the release of hostages in Afghanistan in the past but have either kept it quiet or denied it outright.

Ahmadi said the body of the Korean who was killed was left in the Musheky area of Qarabagh district in Ghazni province. Police said they were going to look for the body.

The South Korean hostages, including 18 women, were kidnapped last Thursday while riding a bus through Ghazni province on the Kabul-Kandahar highway, Afghanistan’s main thoroughfare.

In a separate kidnapping case, a German journalist and two Afghans colleagues were kidnapped by Taliban militants in a dangerous and remote area in eastern Afghanistan Wednesday but were released hours later, said Kunar Gov. Dedar Shalezai.

The spate of recent kidnappings – 26 foreigners have been abducted in the last week – prompted the Afghan government to forbid foreigners living in Kabul from leaving the city without police permission.

Police said officials stationed at checkpoints at the city’s main gates would stop foreigners from leaving Kabul unless they informed officials 24 hours in advance of their travel plans, said Esmatullah Dauladzai, Kabul’s provincial police chief. The directive, issued today, is related to the recent kidnappings, he said.