British Red Cross worker kidnapped in Pakistan

[January 05, 2012]  QUETTA, Pakistan (AP) -- Armed men kidnapped a British Red Cross worker from the southwestern Pakistani city of Quetta on Thursday, highlighting the fragile security situation in the country, police said.

The incident took place hours after Islamist militants elsewhere in the country killed 15 Pakistani security officers they had seized last month close to the Afghan border and left their naked, bullet-riddled bodies sprawled on the ground.

Police officer Nazir Ahmed Kurd said the man was taken from a vehicle close to a Red Cross office in an upscale housing complex in Quetta. The assailants bundled him into their car and drove off. Kurd said the man had been visiting a local school.

International Committee of the Red Cross spokeswoman Sitara Jabeen declined to disclose the man's name or nationality, but confirmed a foreign employee had been seized. The British High Commission said it was looking into the incident.

Baluchistan province is home to Islamist militants and separatist insurgents.

Both groups have kidnapped foreigners and locals in the region before.

Another officer, Ahsan Mahboob, said the British man was traveling with a Pakistani doctor and a driver. They were not seized, he said.

In 2009, an American working for the United Nations refugee agency in the city was kidnapped from the same district as the British aid worker. John Solecki was held for two months by the separatist Baluchistan Liberation United Front before he was released.

The 15 Pakistani officers from the paramilitary Frontier Constabulary were killed in retaliation for an army operation on Jan. 1 in northwest Pakistan that killed several militants, including a prominent commander, according to a statement from the Pakistani Taliban.

It alleged that troops also killed a woman and arrested others, "something that was forbidden and illegitimate in Islam as well as against tribal traditions."

Their bodies were dumped in Shiwa town in the North Waziristan region, said local residents Sada-u-Alla and Salam Khan. Local Frontier Constabulary commander Ali Sher said his men had been sent to the area to pick up the corpses.

The insurgents kidnapped them during a Dec. 22 attack on a Pakistani security base in the border region.

In recent months, some militant commanders and intelligence officials have claimed peace talks with the Pakistani Taliban, one of the largest and most brutal militant groups, were under way. But other Pakistani Taliban commanders have dismissed this, and sporadic attacks have continued.

Tribal leaders and analysts speculate that the group, which has been pounded by Pakistani army offensives and American missile strikes over the last few years, is riven with internal splits.

[Associated Press; By ABDUL SATTAR and MUNIR AHMED]

Ahmed reported from Quetta. Associated Press writers Rasool Dawar in Peshawar and Ishtiaq Mahsud in Dera Ismail Khan contributed to this report.

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