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| Afghanistan/South Asia | |
| Brit worker killed in Kabul | |
| 2005-03-09 | |
| KABUL - Foreign aid and reconstruction workers in Kabul are likely to tighten security after Taliban militants claimed responsibility for the killing of a Briton, which shattered months of fragile calm in the Afghan capital, officials said. Steven MacQueen, 41, an advisor to the war-torn country's Ministry of Rural Development and Rehabilitation, was shot dead in a drive-by shooting late Monday as he drove in front of a UN guesthouse in the center of Kabul. MacQueen was the first foreign national killed so far this year, and it did not appear to have been a robbery, security officials said. Mullah Obaidullah, a deputy to fugitive Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar, claimed responsibility for the attack late Tuesday and warned the group would launch further attacks on foreign and government forces in Afghanistan. "Our men carried out that attack last (Monday) night, killed the British person and managed to escape the site," he said in a statement read to AFP by Taliban spokesman Abdul Latif Hakimi. Obaidullah also vowed to carry out more attacks on foreign and Afghan forces after the end of the harsh winter to prove that the Taliban were still active. "Our message is that as the weather gets warm, we will relaunch our operations and attacks once again," he said.
MacQueen was driving a Toyota Land Cruiser owned by the Afghan ministry and was fired on by attackers driving a similar type of vehicle—both of which resemble those used by the United Nations and other aid agencies. "We are following the investigation closely and once we know what happened and why the man was killed, then we will see whether | |
| Posted by:Steve White |