Aid Worker Killed During Rescue Attempt
The New York Times reports:
A Scottish aid worker who was taken hostage two weeks ago by the Taliban in eastern Afghanistan was killed by her captors early Saturday during an unsuccessful rescue raid, according to the British Foreign Office.
Also Saturday, four Italian soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb in western Afghanistan while escorting a convoy that was transporting building materials for a new operating base in the Gulistan District of Farah Province.
The aid worker, Linda Norgrove, 36, was regional director of a jobs program financed by the United States Agency for International Development for Afghanistan’s eastern region.
Former colleagues described her as a person of enormous warmth and kindness who was deeply committed to helping people in poor areas of the world and who had spent years in Peru and Laos as well as in Afghanistan.
“It is a tragedy that Linda was taken whilst doing the job she loved in a country she loved,” Britain’s foreign secretary, William Hague, said in a statement.
Ms. Norgrove was taken on Sept. 26 as she drove with two other cars from Jalalabad, the largest city in the eastern part of the country, to Asadabad, the capital of Kunar Province, an area heavily infiltrated by Taliban and Hizb-e-Islami insurgents. Kidnapped with her were three Afghan men, two drivers and a local employee of DAI, the American company for which she worked. The three Afghans were released last Sunday, according to officials involved in the case.
NATO forces undertook Saturday’s predawn raid after the American and British militaries received information about where Ms. Norgrove was being held in Watepur District. “We decided that, given the danger she was facing, her best chance of safe release was to act on that information,” Mr. Hague said.
As American forces closed in, her captors killed her. A suicide vest was found nearby, but it was not clear if it had been detonated or if other explosives had been used to kill Ms. Norgrove, according to Western officials in Kabul. They said several of her captors were also killed.
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