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| Districts of Badakhshan. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
(Reuters) - Five aid workers, including two Western women doctors, have been kidnapped by unidentified gunmen in northeastern Afghanistan, police and the provincial governor's office said on Wednesday.
The aid workers working for a foreign-based aid group were making their way from central Faizabad city and were abducted on Tuesday in Yaftal-e Bala district, said Abdul Marouf Rasikh, a spokesman for the governor of Badakhshan province.
Police in the area, which is not a focus for Afghan insurgents but which is home to groups of mainly criminal gunmen, said the aid workers had been visiting a health clinic in Yawan district, where the road had been destroyed by floods.
"They were travelling by donkey. Two foreign women and their Afghan translators were kidnapped and we have started a search operation," said Lal Mohammad Ahmadzai, police spokesman for northern Afghanistan.
NATO-led forces said they had no information on the kidnapping, while NGOs operating in the area declined to comment citing the sensitivity of the issue.
The kidnapping of foreigners has become relatively common in parts of Afghanistan since U-S.-backed Afghan forces toppled the former Taliban government in 2001, heralding a 10-year anti-insurgent war.
(Reporting by Rob Taylor; Editing by Nick Macfie)
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from TOLONEWS:
Two foreign doctors and their three Afghan colleagues were kidnapped in a remote area of northern Afghanistan Tuesday evening, local officials said.
The group, who work for non-government organisation Medair, were stopped by a group of armed men while travelling on horseback between the Yaftali and Ragh districts of the country's furthest north-eastern province of Badakhshan, provincial spokesman Abdul Maroof Rasekh told TOLOnews on Wednesday.
The incident was reported as a kidnapping by the humanitarian organisation, which has not released the names of those believed to be abducted, Rasekh said.
According to a security report, five Medair staff members - two international females and three Afghan males - along with two hired guides were stopped as they left a village in the Yaftali Sufla District by five or six armed men believed to be members of an "armed opposition group" from Shahri Buzorg district.
The report released by the Afghanistan NGO Safety Office (ANSO) said the armed men sent away the two hired horsemen and then moved with the five staff members towards the Dawang area of Shahri Buzorg district.
ANSO said the incident was "an exceptionally strong outlier" for the district, province, and region.
Local police have started a search operation in the two districts, Rasekh said.
No group, including the Taliban, has claimed responsibility for the kidnapping.
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