JALALABAD, Afghanistan (AFP) — Afghan police searched mountains in eastern Afghanistan Tuesday for a Japanese national whom the extremist Taliban claimed to have kidnapped in a new attack on aid workers.
Kazuya Ito, 31, was snatched in the eastern province of Nangarhar as he was going to inspect an irrigation project being built by his employer, the Peshawar-kai non-governmental group, officials said.
His Afghan driver was freed in a clash soon afterwards but the fate of the Japanese, who has worked in Afghanistan since 2003, was unknown by nightfall.
The Afghan interior ministry had alerted reporters that he had been freed in an massive operation involving police and "500 villagers" around 10 hours after he was taken.
But the statement was later retracted as "erroneous" and the search continued, the Japanese government said in Tokyo. The Afghan ministry could not be reached again for an explanation.
Provincial police said they had men in the mountains between Nangarhar and Kunar provinces looking for Ito.
"There are police searches everywhere. It is a mountainous area full of trees," provincial government spokesman Ahmad Zia Abdulzai told AFP.
The Afghan government said Ito was taken in Kuz Kunar district, about 20 kilometres (12 miles) north of Jalalabad city, but Japanese media put the location at Dara-e-Noor, further north and towards Kunar.
Tokyo had set up a liaison office at the residence of Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda to handle the incident, reports said.
"Negotiations are underway involving influential local people. There has been no threat to his life," Mitsuji Fukumoto, a senior official with Peshawar-kai in Japan, told reporters.
There was no confirmation of any ransom demands.
Ito, an agricultural specialist, was captured as he was beginning a daily visit to inspect an irrigation project, said Noor Zaman, deputy manager of the group's office in Jalalabad.
"Today at 6:30 am, as he left his vehicle parked one kilometre (mile) from the site and walked to the construction site, armed men came out of cornfields and abducted him," he told AFP.
The hardline Taliban militia, behind a growing insurgency in Afghanistan, said its men had taken Ito and confirmed a clash with security forces.
It was the latest in a string of attacks on aid workers that have left 25 dead in Afghanistan and raised alarm about the state of the country seven years after the removal of the Taliban regime in 2001.
Part of a deterioration in security has been a spike in kidnappings, some carried out by the Taliban, who were in government between 1996 and 2001, and others by criminal groups seeking ransom.
An Afghan senator was kidnapped near Kabul in mid-July by men who claimed to be Taliban while six Afghan mine clearers have been held in the east of the country for nearly a week.
In the deadliest such attack in years, Taliban gunmen shot dead three Western women and their Afghan driver on August 13 as they were driving to Kabul in a vehicle marked with the logo of their group, the International Rescue Committee.
An Afghan employee of a French aid group, Agency for Technical Cooperation and Development (ACTED), was found murdered in the north last week, two days after he was abducted, his organisation said.
Japan has been a leading donor to Afghanistan since the ouster of the Taliban.
It has lost two nationals to violence in the country. Two school teachers, a man and a woman, were shot dead in 2005 after they apparently went to insurgency-plagued Kandahar province on holiday.
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