Bangladeshi Aid Worker Seized In Latest Afghan Kidnapping

KABUL, Sept. 16 -- A Bangladeshi aid worker helping to administer anti-poverty programs in rural Afghanistan has been kidnapped, his employer said Sunday. It was the latest in a string of abductions of international workers here.

Noor Islam was seized Saturday from a branch office of the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee in Logar province, south of Kabul, according to the organization's Afghanistan director, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of security concerns.

Islam, who is about 40, "was working in the office when some men came and took him forcibly," the director said. "We don't know who they were."

Logar's governor, Abdullah Wardak, told the Reuters news agency that four men dressed as police officers kidnapped the aid worker and stole about $600 from the group's office. He said the organization had ignored warnings to hire security guards.

It was unclear whether the kidnappers were Taliban insurgents or common criminals, Wardak said.

Kidnapping for ransom has become a lucrative business for criminal gangs in Afghanistan, and the Taliban is increasingly employing it as a weapon against U.S. and coalition forces here.

Taliban fighters kidnapped 23 South Korean religious volunteers July 19, killed two of them, released two and held the rest for six weeks before freeing them after the South Korean government confirmed its plan to withdraw its 200 soldiers based here by the end of the year.

Afghanistan's Interior Ministry said in a statement Saturday that three Taliban commanders who had been "directly involved" in that kidnapping were killed by Afghan police during an operation Friday in Ghazni province, where the abductions took place.

In other developments, the U.S. military said that "several" suspected Taliban insurgents were killed in overnight raids in the Taliban stronghold of Garmsir, a district in the southern province of Helmand. Small-arms fire and precision munitions were used in the raids, which targeted Taliban hideouts. Some buildings were damaged, but there were no indications of civilian casualties, the statement said.

"During the operation, a vehicle with a weapons cache inside it was found and destroyed. The cache consisted of several rockets, numerous AK-47s, a heavy machine gun, multiple boxes of ammunition, rocket-propelled grenades and ammunition vests with magazines," the statement said.

Meanwhile, 15 people were injured Saturday when a man remotely detonated a bomb in a crowded bazaar in Ghazni province just as a local government official strolled by, the U.S. military said in a statement Sunday. The bomb had been hidden on a parked bicycle.

Elsewhere, nine suspected Taliban insurgents were detained early Sunday when Afghan and coalition forces raided two compounds in a village about nine miles west of the southern city of Kandahar during a search for "a high-level-insurgent leader responsible for the deaths of Afghans and Coalition forces" in roadside bomb attacks, the U.S. military said in a statement. It was unclear whether the target of the raids was apprehended.