CARE Worker Abducted By 'Thieves'

[David]

AP


Police say a gang of "thieves" has claimed responsibility for kidnapping an Italian relief worker from her car in the Afghan capital, in a bold attack that reinforced fears that militants or criminals are copying tactics used in Iraq.

Gen. Jamil Jumbesh, head of the Interior Ministry's anti-terrorism division, says the group contacted authorities to claim responsibility for the abduction of Clementina Cantoni, 32.

"A group of thieves claimed they did the kidnapping," said Jumbesh, declining to say whether the group has made any demands.

Four men abducted Cantoni, an employee of CARE International, in downtown Kabul on Monday evening, the first kidnapping of a foreigner in Afghanistan since three U.N. election workers were seized last October and held for nearly a month.

Security officials have repeatedly warned that criminals might try to kidnap foreigners in an attempt to force the release of suspects recently arrested in the U.N. case.

While a Taliban splinter group claimed responsibility for those abductions, Afghan officials said earlier this month that six men in police custody, including a suspected bank robber named Tilagai, had confessed to the kidnappings.

Presidential spokesman Jawed Ludin said "it is possible" that supporters of Tilagai could be behind Monday's abduction.

"We have information, but we can not give it out because we are concerned about the safety of Ms. Cantoni," he said. Security forces are "working actively to try to find out the exact circumstances ... of her disappearance and her exact whereabouts."

Hundreds of police officers manned checkpoints across the city through the night to search for Cantoni and her captors, said Gen. Mahboubullah Amiri, a police commander in the Interior Ministry.

"They are searching cars and asking the drivers for their documents, but there are no positive signs so far," Amiri said.

In Italy, a lawmaker linked the abduction to recent violent protests in Afghanistan over allegations that U.S. interrogators desecrated Islam's holy book at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

"I think that it was a reaction to those alleged revelations, even though the article was later denied," Gustavo Selva, who heads a parliamentary foreign affairs commission, was quoted by the Italian news agency ANSA as saying.

Cantoni's abduction is "painful news, but I am sure that the work of our intelligence together with diplomacy will succeed" in freeing her, Selva said.

The Italian foreign ministry said a crisis unit was working on the case.

NATO's security force stationed in Kabul also helped mount checkpoints, it said in a statement.

The multinational troops were "prepared to increase deterring pressure on those who would initiate abductions, attacks or demonstrations in efforts to destabilize the country," it said. It didn't elaborate.

The aid group said Cantoni had been engaged in humanitarian work for 10 years and lived since March 2002 in Afghanistan, where she led a project helping thousands of Afghan widows and their families.

"CARE International is deeply concerned and calls for her immediate release," it said in a brief statement released in Brussels.

An agency driver had just dropped a Canadian woman at a house in downtown Kabul on Monday evening when the kidnappers driving a sedan cut off the vehicle and abducted Cantoni, said Paul Barker, the agency's director in Afghanistan.

"Four men carrying Kalashnikovs bashed in the window of her car and took her away. They told the driver not to move or he would be shot," Barker said.

Marco Formigoni, a family friend, spoke to reporters outside the Cantoni family home in an upscale Milan neighborhood, relaying the family's hope "that this affair ends quickly and well."

The abduction of Cantoni was the latest in a string of attacks in Kabul and reinforced fears that militants or criminals are copying tactics used in Iraq.

On May 7, a suicide bomber blew himself up in an Internet cafe in the same area as Monday's abduction, killing a U.N. worker from Myanmar. Last month, an American civilian escaped an apparent kidnapping by throwing himself from a moving car.

Kabul had been largely free of the fear of the kind of kidnappings rife in Iraq until October, when the U.N. workers - one each from the Philippines, Northern Ireland and Kosovo - were seized at gunpoint in the city.

This is the second kidnapping of a CARE worker by suspected militants in recent months. Margaret Hassan, CARE's British director in Iraq, was kidnapped in Baghdad in October and believed killed, although no body was recovered.