Mine-clearance agency's driver abducted in Ghazni

Two days after the murder of a UN staff member by armed men in the southern city of Ghazni, a driver for a mine-clearance agency was abducted by gunmen from the centre of the same city on Monday. He was later released. The United Nations Mine Action Centre for Afghanistan (UNMACA) told IRIN that the incident had occurred when a vehicle belonging to the Mine Detection Dog Centre (MDC) (an implementing partner of UNMACA) and its driver were stopped as it was returning from the field. "At around five o’clock in the evening, a vehicle from MDC was returning to its camp in Ghazni city when two persons on a motorcycle and two other persons [all armed] stopped the vehicle [in the city] and abducted the driver and his vehicle and drove 10 km northwest of Ghazni, where they were met by another eight people [allies of the abductors]," Patrick Fruchet, a UNMACA external relations officer, said. Subsequently, the driver was released after being robbed and the vehicle driven away. The incident follows a series of serious security incidents involving aid agencies and UN organisations over the last eight days in the south of the country. On 11 November, a vehicle belonging to the mine clearance-agency, Handicap International-Belgium, with two national staff on board, hit a newly laid landmine near the southern city of Kandahar, which was followed by a car bomb attack in the afternoon of the same day at the regional office of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan in Kandahar. The last and most alarming, however, was the murder on Sunday of a UN staff member, Bettina Goislard, a 29-year-old French national working for the Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which has drawn strong condemnation from the UN, the Afghan government and the aid community at large. The aid bodies in southern Afghanistan reacted strongly to the incident, and held an emergency meeting on Monday to consider their options, which might include their temporary withdrawal from the region, according to a statement released following the meeting, from Kandahar on Tuesday. "In the last six months, aid agencies operating in the south have seen their offices attacked, their national staff threatened and kidnapped and dedicated national staff killed," said Martin Lagneau, the director of Handicap International-Belgium, in the statement. According to the Afghan NGOs Security Office (ANSO), these incidents not only indicated the breadth of attacks, which were escalating, on the UN, NGOs, government and the US-led coalition forces "but also that more precise and ruthless methods are being employed", said Fritz Prax, ANSO's coordinator for the southern region, in the statement. It went on to say that aid agencies in the south had already been forced to drastically scale down the scope of their operations. Most were already restricting their activities to a rapidly shrinking area in and around Kandahar city. "The situation continues to deteriorate. We do not believe that measures taken so far, including the planned PRTs [US-led provincial reconstruction teams], will effectively address the deepening crisis. In the south, we are now at a critical juncture," stated Anne Wood, the senior area coordinator for Mercy Corps International, an NGO which is extensively active in the south. UNMACA said Monday’s incident was of great concern in the light of the killing of the UNHCR staff member, which had been perpetrated in Ghazni. It noted that there were no further details about the abductors of the MDC driver or the whereabouts of the MDC-marked vehicle.