Afghan police free German captive

Afghan police rescued a German aid worker who was snatched while dining with her husband at a restaurant in the capital Kabul, and arrested four suspected kidnappers in the sting operation today, officials said.

Hundreds of police surrounded a house to free the 31-year-old woman in a raid at 12.30am (2100 Irish time Sunday) in western Kabul, not far from the area where she was taken captive on Saturday, said Interior Ministry spokesman Zemerai Bashary.

He said authorities have arrested and are interrogating “four suspects who are directly involved in this case.” He described them as the ringleader and three of his friends.

Bashary said more than 300 police were involved in the operation.

Police are searching for other accomplices, he said. Preliminary investigations show that the gang was criminal – not Islamic insurgents – and that they demanded £500,000 (€736,250) for her release.

A video broadcast yesterday, in which the woman identifies herself as Christina Meier, said the kidnappers were demanding a prisoner swap.

Amrullah Saleh, the head of the Afghan intelligence service, said the leader of the criminal gang had been freed from a northern Afghan prison two months earlier.

Saleh and Interior Minister Zarar Ahmad Muqbal oversaw the operation, which involved police and intelligence officers.

In Germany, the Christian aid organisation that Meier worked for, Ora International, said she was doing “well considering the circumstances” and was at the German Embassy with her husband.

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier voiced “relief and great joy” at her release.

Speaking in Berlin, he thanked Afghan authorities and “the Norwegian security presence in Kabul, with which we co-operated closely and which also helped to bring this kidnapping to a happy end.”

He did not elaborate.

Meier had been taken captive on Saturday by four men who pulled up to the restaurant in a grey Toyota Corolla. One went inside and pretended to order a pizza, two others waited outside the restaurant, and a third remained in the car, intelligence officials investigating the incident said.

The man in the restaurant pulled out a pistol, walked up to a table where Meier was sitting with her husband and took her, the officials said. The husband was not abducted.

Police spotted the speeding car and opened fire, but hit a nearby taxi and killed its driver.

Yesterday, a private Afghan television station broadcast a video in which Meier was shown sitting on the floor inside a room, her head covered with a white scarf.

She was prompted to make remarks both in English and in Dari by a man speaking in broken English. The man then instructed her to show a copy of her German passport and an ID card issued by the aid group she works for.

Tolo TV, which broadcast the video, did not say how it obtained it.

“I am fine. There are no threats against me. I want my country to do what it can for my release,” she said in Dari, reading from a piece of paper, occasionally looking toward the camera.

A male voice off camera prompted her to say, “to help” and told her to also use the word “urgent.”

“Please help for my release, and help me,” she said.

A man wearing sunglasses, and his head covered with a scarf, later appeared in the video and demanded that the Afghan government release a number of unidentified prisoners. He said a member of their group would provide the government with a list.

“We are not bad people. We are a special network,” the man said at the end of the video.

Authorities, meanwhile, detained a suspect involved in the murder of two German journalists, killed last October in the northern province of Baghlan, Bashary said.

The suspect was detained last week in the same province where the murder happened, Bashary said, without elaborating.

Karen Fischer and Christian Struwe, freelance reporters working for Deutsche Welle, Germany’s state-owned broadcast outlet, were shot to death outside a small village where they had set up a tent to spend the night.

Germany still has the task of securing the release of Rudolf Blechschmidt, a German engineer who has been held captive in Afghanistan since July 18, Steinmeier said. Another German man kidnapped with Blechschmidt was shot dead.

A Taliban spokesman, meanwhile, warned that South Korean negotiators are “not doing enough” to meet Taliban demands for a prisoner swap in exchange for the release of the remaining 19 South Korean hostages.

Two men in the group were killed after they were taken hostage on July 19, and two women have been released in what the Taliban called an act of goodwill.

“The Korean government is not interested in releasing the Korean hostages … because they’re not forcing the US and Kabul administrations to release Taliban prisoners,” Zabiullah Mujaheed, who claims to speak for the militants, said by telephone from an undisclosed location.

“The Taliban extended the deadline several times. Now the Taliban want the Korean people to know, if anything bad happens, the Taliban are not responsible. The Korean government is responsible,” he said.

The Afghan government came under heavy criticism after exchanging five Taliban prisoners for the release of an Italian journalist in March.

Worried that hostage-taking would become an industry, the government said the case was a one-time deal and has ruled out any further such swaps.