KABUL - Taleban insurgents on Saturday freed four staff of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) they had kidnapped in Afghanistan three days ago, an ICRC statement said. ‘The unconditional release of our four colleagues is a great relief to us and their families,’ Franz Rauchenstein, deputy head of the ICRC delegation in Kabul, said in a statement.The four men, two Afghans, a Macedonian and a citizen of Myanmar, were seized by the Taleban in Wardak province, southwest of the Afghan capital Kabul on Wednesday.
One of the hostages said they had been well treated by their captors. ‘The treatment was fine. There was no interrogation, no questioning, we lived in the same condition as the Taleban. There was food and water,’ the Macedonian hostage told an Afghan reporter shortly before his release. ‘It was a long journey on foot in the mountains and then we spent the night in one house—two nights—and then this morning we came down,’ he said in recorded comments made available to Reuters.
‘We were not afraid. We have contacts with the Taleban, we know the Taleban,’ he said.
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