A spokesman for Afghanistan’s Taliban claimed on Saturday that the militants had killed two Germans and five Afghan hostages and threatened that 23 South Korean captives could meet the same fate. However, Afghanistan’s foreign ministry and German Foreign Minister Franck-Walter Steinmeier said one of the Germans was still thought to be alive.The other German had died but had not been murdered, Steinmeier said, while the Afghan ministry said he had died of a heart attack. “Nothing indicates that he was assassinated - everything suggests he died due to the conditions of detention imposed by his captors,” Steinmeier told reporters in Berlin. Steinmeier said the government was working closely with Afghan authorities to free the surviving German hostage and that Chancellor Angela Merkel was being kept abreast of developments. He said the German’s death in Taliban hands was no less “tragic” because he had died of natural causes. “The fate of the German and Korean hostages is affecting us profoundly and we are even more outraged that their fate is being determined by the extremists forces in Afghanistan, above all the Taliban,” he said. “Now it’s about saving the life of the second hostage,” he said.
Taliban spokesman Yousuf Ahmadi warned that the insurgents would kill the 23 South Korean Christian evangelists they had abducted earlier by Sunday unless an equal number of jailed Taliban fighters were freed before then. Ahmadi, speaking by telephone from