Gunmen Kill U.N. Worker in Pakistan

PESHAWAR, Pakistan, July 16 -- A senior Pakistani staff member of the United Nations refugee agency was shot and killed Thursday morning in an apparent kidnapping attempt while leaving a refugee camp near this northwestern city, according to U.N. officials.

Zill-e-Usman, 59, was one of three people in a marked United Nations vehicle on their way out of the Katcha Ghari refugee camp about 11:30 a.m. when another vehicle intercepted their path and gunmen opened fire, said Stephanie Bunker, a spokeswoman for the U.N. refugee agency.

Usman was shot several times in the chest and died. A second U.N. official, repatriation clerk Ishfaq Ahmed, was shot in the leg and was expected to survive. The driver of the vehicle is believed to have escaped unharmed, Bunker said. A guard with the Commissionerate of Afghan Refugees was also killed and another guard was injured in the shootout, according to a U.N. statement.

"It looks like it was a kidnapping that's gone wrong," Bunker said. "The intent was clearly hostile."

Employees for Western and international organizations have been targeted and killed in the past in Peshawar, the violent capital of the North-West Frontier Province and a gateway to the tribal regions along the border with Afghanistan and Pakistan, where Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters operate. Some agencies have moved employees to Islamabad, seeking safer confines.

Another official with the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, Aleksandar Vorkapic, died last month in the bombing of the Pearl Continental Hotel in Peshawar. A Unicef official, Perseveranda So of the Philippines, was also killed in that blast. And Stephen D. Vance, who directed a workforce development program funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, was shot and killed in Peshawar along with his driver last November.

Usman, who was married with four children, joined the U.N. refugee agency's Peshawar office in 1984, and was chairman of the staff council there. The United Nations is working at several camps to help the roughly 2 million people who have fled their homes in the Swat Valley and the surrounding area to avoid fighting between the military and the Taliban. A small fraction of those refugees began this week to return to their homes in Swat.

"The UN community in Pakistan is once again devastated to have had yet another of its staff member a victim of a brutal attack," U.N. resident coordinator Fikret Akcura said in a statement. "On behalf of the United Nations community in Pakistan, I strongly condemn this brutal killing, an unacceptable attack on our humanitarian workers."