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A student at a rally held a portrait of one of the South Korean hostages at her alma mater yesterday in Seoul. (Ahn Young-joon/associated press) |
Taliban kidnappers kill 2d Korean hostage
Tell Afghanistan others are at risk
KABUL -- Taliban kidnappers shot dead a male South Korean hostage yesterday, a spokesman for the rebels said, accusing the Afghan government of ignoring demands for the release of Taliban prisoners.
"We killed one of the male hostages at 6:30 this evening because the Kabul administration did not listen to our repeated demands," spokesman Qari Mohammad Yousuf said by telephone from an unknown location.
Afghan police said today they discovered the bullet-riddled body of the hostage in central Afghanistan.
The Taliban seized 23 Korean Christians, 18 of them women, 11 days ago from a bus in Ghazni on the main highway south from Kabul and killed the leader of the group Wednesday.
The spokesman said the Taliban would kill more hostages if Kabul ignores their demand to release rebel prisoners, but he set no new deadline. The shooting was a bloody rejection of the authorities' request for more time for talks on freeing the hostages after a rebel deadline expired earlier in the day.
Al Jazeera television broadcast a video purporting to show at least seven of the female hostages, wearing headscarves and apparently unharmed. Four were sitting on the ground, the others standing beside men in Afghan robes, apparently militants.
The face of one Asian man also wearing traditional Afghan robes was shown, but it was not clear if he was a hostage or an insurgent.
Al Jazeera said it had obtained the footage from a source outside Afghanistan.
The television said an off- camera speaker was reading a statement but did not report what he said. The purported hostages were not speaking in the video.
The hostage crisis has focused attention on growing lawlessness in Afghanistan with Taliban influence and attacks spreading to many areas previously considered safe, and making travel between major cities risky.
A spokesman for the governor of Ghazni Province, where the hostages were seized, said earlier that Afghan authorities had asked for two more days to settle the hostage crisis peacefully.
© Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company.
