Kabul: The United Nations said five of its Afghan employees were missing Friday amid reports their vehicles were hijacked in the same northern province where fierce fighting killed four German soldiers and three Afghan police the previous day.
Word of the UN workers' disappearance in Baghlan province followed twin bombings on Thursday targeting foreign companies in the southern city of Kandahar that killed at least three people.
A Baghlan police official said the UN employees had been kidnapped by Taliban insurgents. Dan McNorton, a spokesman for the world body in Kabul, said only that the five Afghans, who worked for the UN Office for Project Services, were missing.
"The UN is working with the Afghan authorities to ascertain their current whereabouts and the exact circumstances of the situation," McNorton said.
Baghlan's deputy police chief, Zalmay Mangal, said Taliban operatives hijacked the workers' vehicles on Thursday and the UN employees were being held in Dahana-i-Ghori district of Baghlan province. Afghan police have asked tribal elders in the area to help ensure the workers' safety, he said.
Baghlan, about 190 kilometres north of the capital, was the site of intense fighting on Thursday between international forces and Taliban militants.
Single biggest loss
Three of the German soldiers were killed when a rocket slammed into their Eagle armoured vehicle, while the fourth died when a grenade was tossed into another vehicle while it was parked, the German Defence Ministry said. It said the soldiers ranged in age from 24 to 38. Another five German soldiers were wounded.
It was the biggest single-day loss of life suffered by the Germans since June 2003, when four soldiers were killed and 29 wounded in a bombing near Kabul airport.
Baghlan provincial police spokesman Habib Rahman said three Afghan policemen were also killed in Thursday's fighting, which included airstrikes and heavy weapons.
Fighting in the north has proved an increasing distraction from Nato's main forces on Kandahar, the largest city in southern Afghanistan. The city is the spiritual heartland of the Taliban and Nato forces are gearing up for a major operation to drive out insurgents and assert central government control.
The Thursday night attacks on a hotel and compound housing foreign companies in Kandahar showed enduring gaps in security despite a boost in police deployments and traffic checkpoints. The Taliban maintains a visible presence in large swaths of the region and parts of the city remain no-go areas for security forces, especially after dark.
On March 13, a suicide squad detonated bombs at a newly-fortified prison, police headquarters and two other locations in a failed attempt to free Taliban prisoners. At least 30 people died in the blasts.
Three people, all Afghans, were killed in Thursday night's attack in which a suicide bomber detonated his explosives-laden vehicle at the inner security barrier of a compound shared by several Western companies.
Another 26 people were injured, 10 of them foreigners, including three Americans and a South African, Kandahar's provincial governor Tooryalai Wesa told reporters yesterday. He said he didn't know the nationalities of the other foreigners.
No corroboration
An initial report on Thursday said three foreigners had been killed in the attack, but Wesa said that was not true and there was no corroboration that any foreigners had died.
Nato said 10 of the wounded were evacuated to its hospital in Kandahar, but gave no information on their nationalities or medical status.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai denounced the violence, saying such attacks have "repeatedly shown the terrorists' hostility toward innocent Afghan civilians and intention to keep the people of Kandahar in an atmosphere of fear."
The blast at the compound blew out windows as far as 4 kilometres away, including those at the home of Ahmad Wali Karzai, a high-ranking official in Kandahar and the Afghan president's half brother. The compound includes the offices of the international contracting company Louis Berger Group, the Afghanistan Stabilisation Initiative and the aid contracting company Chemonics International.
