31 July 2007
31 July 2007
Special Broadcasting Service World News Headline Stories
Taliban militants say they have shot dead a second male South Korean hostage with AK-47, as a video showing several of the captives was broadcast on Arabic television. ...No individual organisation has confirmed the claim..'We shot dead a male captive because the government did not listen to our demands,' spokesman Qari Yousef Ahmadi told news agency Reuters. 'We killed one of the male hostages at 0100hrs (Singapore time) because the Kabul administration did not listen to our repeated demands,' he told Reuters by telephone from an unknown location ..... He said the body had been dumped by the side of a road. The shooting was a rejection of the authorities' request for more time for talks on freeing the South Korean hostages after the expiry of a rebel deadline earlier in the day. 'Time running out' - The Taliban seized 23 Korean Christians, 16 of them women, 11 days ago from a bus in Ghazni on the main highway south from Kabul and killed the leader of the group on Wednesday after an earlier deadline passed...... The Taliban had ..... insisted the release of Taliban prisoners was the only way to settle the crisis.....ruled out further talks after they said government negotiators demanded the unconditional release of the hostages .... Afghan officials..... force might be used to rescue them if talks failed.... the body of the South Korean Christian pastor shot dead by the Taliban last week arrived in South Korea on Monday. The bullet-ridden body of Bae Hyung-kyu was found on Wednesday. His brother, Bae Shin-kyu, told reporters the family would not hold a funeral until the other hostages returned to South Korea.
Request for release of S.Korean hostages in Afghanistan
This is an urgent campaign to free the remaining South Korean aid workers who have been taken hostage by Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. The Taliban have already executed 1 hostage, and claimed to have killed the 2nd, and are threatening to execute the rest this week, an action that could trigger a mass evacuation of life-giving humanitarian aid from all of Afghanistan.The situation is desperate, but there is hope.
The Taliban are all from the 'Pashtun' ethnic group, and observe a strict code called Pashtunwali. This code demands, above all else: "hospitality to all, especially guests and strangers". There are rumours of infighting among the Taliban over these kidnappings, because they clearly violate the code.
A global outcry for the Taliban to follow their own code would certainly be covered by media in Afghanistan and Pakistan where the Taliban are based – creating massive local pressure on them to free their prisoners. But these hostages are living under a 24 hour death sentence.
We have seconds not minutes to act. Sign the petition below and then forward this link to your friends:
http://www.avaaz.org/en/honour_the_afghan_code/
Signing Off.
