PESHAWAR: A UN official working in a camp for displaced civilians and a security guard were killed Thursday during a failed kidnapping attempt in the Pakistani city of Peshawar, officials said.

The incident marked the second ambush targeting UN refugee agency staff in Pakistan in five months, after an American UNHCR official was abducted in February, and reflects a rising tide of violence in the country’’s northwest.

“A national staff of UNHCR at the Kutcha Gari camp has been a victim of a kidnapping attempt that turned into a shooting,” UN spokesman Janos Tisovszky said while talking to a French news agency by telephone.

“He was shot in the chest several times and he was rushed to hospital,” he added. Another UN spokeswoman, Stephanie Bunker, said the official died.

“He was in the camp. There was a shooting and he was shot in the chest. He died after being shot in the chest,” she said.

Police in Peshawar, the capital of Pakistan’’s violent northwest region where 1.9 million people have been displaced by fighting between government troops and Taliban militants, said the UN official and his security guard died.

The city, which is near the border with Afghanistan, has witnessed a surge in violence blamed on Taliban militants, with Pakistani troops pressing offensives against rebels in the surrounding tribal belt and nearby districts.

Four unidentified gunmen opened fire on the UNHCR vehicle and fled after the attack, a senior Pakistani police official said.

“A senior UNHCR field officer’’s car was fired at. He sustained injuries and later died in the hospital,” Abdul Ghafoor Afridi said.

“His security guard, who sustained bullet wounds in the incident, succumbed to injuries in the hospital,” Afridi said.

Officials working for foreign governments and organisations have been targeted previously in Peshawar, where locals are also becoming increasingly fearful for their safety over bomb attacks and rising fundamentalism.

A US development worker and his driver were shot dead last November while heading to his office in the University Town area of Peshawar.

He was associated with a US-funded programme to help develop Pakistan’’s lawless tribal areas along the Afghan border, where Washington has alleged that Taliban and Al-Qaeda militants are plotting attacks on Western targets.

In separate incidents last November, gunmen kidnapped an Iranian diplomat, Hashmatullah Atharzadeh, and abducted a Canadian journalist.

Suspected Taliban militants are still holding Afghan Consul General Abdul Khaliq Farahi, kidnapped near Peshawar last September.

Peshawar, with a population of more than 2.5 million people, has also been swollen by about 1.7 million Afghan refugees uprooted during the 1979-1989 Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

Gunmen kidnapped American UN official John Solecki from Quetta, the capital of Pakistan’’s restive southwestern Baluchistan province, in February.

That was the most high-profile abduction of a Westerner in Pakistan since US journalist Daniel Pearl was kidnapped and killed in 2002.

Solecki, who headed the local UNHCR office, was held hostage for two months. His driver was killed in the abduction.

Thanks to geo.tv

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