KABUL (AFP) - A breakaway Taliban group claiming to have abducted three foreign UN workers from Kabul because they assisted Afghanistan`s "fake election" threatened to kill them if a rescue mission was launched.
"Our group has captured the three foreign infidels and we are keeping them at a safe place. So far they are safe," Mullah Mohammad Ishaq, a spokesman for the Jaishul-Muslameen (Army of Muslims) group, told AFP by cellphone.
"But if any forces are used against us to free them, those forces will be responsible for whatever harm that will come to the lives of the hostages."
The UN workers -- a British-Irish woman, a Kosovar woman and a Filipino diplomat -- were pulled from their UN-marked car by armed men wearing military-style jackets and bundled into a black four-wheel drive on Thursday.
The four-wheel-drive was later seen speeding towards the Paghman valley, notorious for banditry and past kidnappings of Afghans.
The group was considering issuing demands including the release of Taliban prisoners from the US detention centre at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the spokesman said.
"We will decide about our final demand in a shura (council) meeting tonight," Ishaq said.
He said they wanted to press the United Nations and the post-Taliban government in Afghanistan "to rethink their policies against the Taliban."
Fighters loyal to the Taliban, ousted from government in a US-led operation in late 2001, are being hunted in Afghanistan by a US-led military coalition and allied Afghan forces.
US-backed interim leader Hamid Karzai, who won the October 9 presidential ballot in a landslide, has pledged to prosecute those Taliban figures guilty of "heinous crimes."
Hundreds of Afghan police from a newly trained commando unit scoured the Paghman valley west of Kabul Friday in a desperate hunt for the abducted trio.
Ishaq was speaking on a cellphone with a Pakistani number and said he was inside Afghanistan in mountains close to the border with Pakistan. He refused to reveal the whereabouts of the hostages.
Ishaq said the abductors had originally targeted 25 election workers.
"There were 25 people that we targeted but we got only three. They all had come to support the infidel forces," he said.
"They helped the holding of fake elections in our Islamic country to support the infidels` puppet (Karzai) to fool the people of Afghanistan," he said.
He vowed more "jihad" (holy war) against "these infidels."
The abductions took place as UN officials announced the end of the long ballot count of Afghanistan`s first presidential election, which gave Karzai 55.4 percent of the votes.
Ishaq said Jaishul-Muslameen`s members included former Taliban fighters, but was not part of the Taliban. The group`s leader was a commander named Syed Akbar Agha, he said.
Intelligence officials had earlier identified Jaishul-Muslameen as a new military wing of the fundamentalist Taliban regime.
Karzai, whose election victory was still days away from being officially announced, condemned the abductions as "an act of enmity against the Afghan people aimed at derailing the process of peace and prosperity."
The daylight abductions, the first of their kind in Kabul, sparked fears of copycat Iraq-style kidnappings in Afghanistan.
UN and international aid agencies ordered their expatriate employees to stay indoors on Friday. The US embassy warned this month that foreigners could be the victims of political kidnappings.
The attack was the third on foreigners in Kabul in two months, falling just five days after a purported Taliban suicide bomber struck a crowded street, killing an American woman and an Afghan girl.
Some 500 newly trained Afghan police commandos from the "quick reaction force" were deployed to search the Paghman valley, 30 kilometres (18 miles) west of Kabul, interior ministry spokesman Lutfullah Mashal said Friday.
Three suspects were arrested late Thursday in Kabul, he said.
"They were wearing illegal military uniforms and they were carrying illegal weapons. From their features they look quite similar to the eyewitness descriptions," Mashal told AFP.
"I cannot tell you if they were linked to the kidnappers but we hope these arrests will help us find the right people."
Suspected Taliban insurgents have killed more than 61 election workers this year, three of them foreigners. Another 11 Chinese engineers were killed in northeast Kunduz province in May.
10/29/2004 - 17:40 GMT - AFP