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KABUL - Taleban kidnappers shot dead a male South Korean hostage yesterday, a spokesman for the group said, accusing the Afghan government of not listening to rebel demands for the release of Taleban prisoners.
"We killed one of the male hostages at 6.30 this evening (local time) because the Kabul administration did not listen to our repeated demands," spokesman Qari Mohammad Yousuf told Reuters by telephone from an unknown location.
The Taleban 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 on Wednesday after an earlier deadline passed.
The spokesman said the Taleban would kill more hostages if Kabul ignored their demand to release rebel prisoners but set no new deadline. He said the body of the Korean shot on Monday had been dumped on a roadside.
The shooting was a bloody rejection of the authorities' request for more time for talks on freeing the hostages after the expiry of a rebel deadline earlier in the day.
Al Jazeera television broadcast a video showing at least seven of the female hostages, wearing head scarves and apparently unharmed. Four were sitting on the ground, the rest 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, apparently made by an amateur, "from a source outside Afghanistan." It did not broadcast the sound track, but the hostages were not speaking.
The hostage crisis has focused attention on growing lawlessness in Afghanistan with Taleban influence, suicide bombs and attacks spreading to many areas previously considered safe and making road travel between major cities a risky affair.
A spokesman for the governor of Ghazni province, southwest of the capital Kabul, where the hostages were seized, said earlier that Afghan authorities had asked for two more days in which to settle the hostage crisis peacefully.
The Taleban had earlier insisted the release of Taleban prisoners was the only way to settle the crisis.
On Sunday, the Taleban ruled out further talks after they said government negotiators demanded the unconditional release of the hostages and a senior Afghan official said that force might be used to rescue them if talks failed.
The government had wanted the Taleban to first release the 18 women hostages, but the insurgents demanded the government release its prisoners first, leading to deadlock, said a Kabul-based Western security analyst who declined to be named.
President Hamid Karzai has remained silent throughout the hostage ordeal, except for condemning the abduction, the largest by the Taleban since US-led forces overthrew the movement's radical Islamic government in 2001.
He was harshly criticised for freeing a group of Taleban in March in exchange for the release of an Italian journalist.
The body of the South Korean Christian pastor shot dead by the Taleban last week arrived in South Korea on Monday.
The bullet-riddled body of Bae Hyung-kyu was found last Wednesday, the day he would have turned 42. His brother, Bae Shin-kyu, told reporters the family would not hold a funeral until the other hostages returned to South Korea.
In Seoul, family members of the hostages gathered at Saemmul Church on hearing news that a second male hostage had been shot, said a pastor at the church, which sent the volunteers to Afghanistan.
Broadcaster KBS said the foreign ministry and the presidential Blue House were trying to verify the report.
A South Korean shipment of emergency medical supplies and daily necessities has been delivered to the Taleban, but Seoul does not know if the goods have reached the Koreans, Yonhap news agency quoted a presidential spokesman as saying earlier.
The Koreans were abducted a day after two German aid workers and their five Afghan colleagues were seized by Taleban in neighbouring Wardak province. The body of one of the Germans has been found with gunshot wounds.
- REUTERS
