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ISLAMABAD: Pakistani authorities searched for the country’s
abducted ambassador to Afghanistan and two kidnapped nuclear experts
on Tuesday as insecurity mounted ahead of crucial elections next
week.
The abductions happened on Monday near the
country’s rugged northwestern border with Afghanistan, where
Taliban and al-Qaeda militants are waging an insurgency against the
US-allied government in Islamabad.
The Pakistani envoy, Tariq Azizuddin, was
heading to the Afghan capital Kabul with his driver on Monday when
they disappeared in the lawless Khyber tribal district, officials
said.
“We have launched efforts for his recovery. It
now appears clear that he has been kidnapped,” Rasool Khan Wazir,
chief administrative official in Khyber, told Agence France-Presse.
“We are trying to collect information. We cannot disclose our
strategy but we are hopeful we will find out where he has been kept
and who is involved.”
Security officials said tribal authorities were
scouring the rugged area, the site of the famed Khyber Pass linking
Afghanistan and Pakistan, and had closed the main road between the
two countries.
The Pakistan Embassy in Kabul said it last had
contact with the ambassador on Monday morning as he traveled from
the northwestern city of Peshawar into the tribal area.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai said Tuesday he
hoped for Azizuddin’s quick rescue from “terrorists.”
“May God make it happen that our brother and
neighboring country, Pakistan, is able to rescue him from the
abductors, the terrorists,” Karzai said.
Azizuddin is the most senior of several
government officials to have been abducted in the mountainous tribal
belt. Blame has either fallen on Islamist militants or criminal
kidnap gangs.
Police on Tuesday confirmed that masked men from
the country’s northwest also abducted two Pakistan Atomic Energy
Commission workers.
-- AFP
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