Aid worker abducted in Afghanistan

KABUL, Afghanistan — An Italian aid worker was kidnapped Monday to try to force the release of men jailed in the abduction of three U.N. workers last fall, officials said.

Clementina Cantoni, 32, has worked with CARE International in Kabul for almost two years, caring for widows and their families. Four men kidnapped her at gunpoint in downtown Kabul on her way to a yoga class. The kidnapping has fueled tension in a country still reeling from the worst anti-Western violence since a U.S.-led coalition overthrew the Taliban in late 2001. Most U.N. workers stayed home from work yesterday. All cars leading out of Kabul were stopped and searched to see if Cantoni was being smuggled out of the capital.

Unlike in Iraq, kidnappings and anti-Western violence are relatively rare in Afghanistan. The last kidnapping was in October, when three U.N. election workers were held for almost a month before being released.

Afghan police recently arrested six men in connection with that kidnapping and say they are closing in on the criminal gang responsible. In the past few weeks, security officials have said the gang might kidnap foreigners to pressure the government to release the arrested men. Yesterday morning, kidnappers called the Italian Embassy, the local office of CARE International and a top intelligence official, government officials said. In each call, the kidnappers said they were holding Cantoni. They also said the police were holding some of their friends, whom they wanted released, the officials said.

In Italy, Foreign Minister Gianfranco Fini confirmed that Cantoni's abductors had contacted Afghan authorities.

The kidnapping comes on the heels of five days of violent demonstrations over a news report that U.S. interrogators at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, flushed a Quran down a toilet in an attempt to force detainees to talk. At least 15 people were killed in riots in Afghanistan. Newsweek magazine has since retracted the report.

Despite the retraction, Italian lawmaker Gustavo Selva, who heads a foreign-affairs panel, linked Cantoni's abduction to the furor over the Newsweek claims.

Also yesterday

Assassination case: A French court jailed three men for two to seven years yesterday for helping al-Qaida agents who killed Afghan resistance leader Ahmad Shah Masood just before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. Algerian national Abderrahmane Ameuroud and Frenchmen Adel Tebourski and Youssef el Aouni were convicted of providing funds and forged documents to the two Tunisian militants who posed as journalists and died when they detonated a bomb that killed Masood. He was a key military and political leader of the Northern Alliance, the main opposition to the fundamentalist Taliban movement that had provided Osama bin Laden a base in Afghanistan.

Karzai to U.S.: Afghan President Hamid Karzai will meet with President Bush and top administration officials in Washington next week, his spokesman said — a trip expected to include talks on long-term military aid and the fates of Afghans held at Guantánamo Bay.