UN worker killed in Pakistan ambush
PESHAWAR, Pakistan - A senior Pakistani staff member of the United Nations refugee agency was shot and killed yesterday morning in an apparent kidnapping attempt while leaving a refugee camp near this northwestern city, UN officials said.
Zill-e-Usman, 59, was one of three people in a marked UN vehicle on their way out of the Katcha Ghari refugee camp when a vehicle intercepted theirs and gunmen opened fire, said Stephanie Bunker, a spokeswoman for the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
Usman was shot several times in the chest and died. A second 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 shoot-out, according to a UN statement.
“It looks like it was a kidnapping that’s gone wrong,’’ Bunker said.
Employees for Western and international organizations have been targeted and killed in the past in Peshawar, the violent capital of 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 for their safety.
Another refugee agency official, Aleksandar Vorkapic, died last month in the bombing of Pearl Continental Hotel in Peshawar. A UNICEF official, Perseveranda So of the Philippines, was also killed in that blast. And Stephen Vance, who directed a workforce development program funded by the US 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 UN 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 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. 