TEHRAN (AFP) — A Japanese student kidnapped in Iran is in good condition after being taken by a bandit who is seeking to exchange him for his recently arrested son, a security source was quoted as saying Thursday.
Satoshi Nakamura, 23, was abducted on Monday by a bandit named Esmail "Shakhbaksh and is in good condition," the Fars news agency quoted the source as saying.
Shakhbaksh kidnapped the student to "exchange him for his son ... who belongs to a group of bandits and was recently arrested," the source said.
The bandit is said to be the same man whose gang who abducted two Belgian tourists in August, who were later freed.
Nakamura was seized as he left his hotel in Bam in the southeastern province of Kerman and headed for the city's ancient citadel, a tourist attraction devastated by a 2003 earthquake, state news agency IRNA said.
The official, quoted by Fars, said the "kidnappers have moved the Japanese citizen from the Bam area to the (neighbouring) province of Sistan-Baluchestan."
Iranian police named Shakhbaksh as the man who had abducted Belgian tourist Stefan Boeve, 28, and his travelling companion Carla van den Eeckhout, 37, in notoriously dangerous Sistan-Baluchestan on August 12.
Van den Eeckhout was was freed two days later but Boeve was held captive for nearly a month. Belgium said it paid no ransom for their release.
Speaking of Nakamura on Monday, Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda said "I want to bring him back. Saving his life is the top priority."
Foreign Minister Masahiko Komura said he had asked his Iranian counterpart Manouchehr Mottaki for assistance.
"He said they have identified the whereabouts of the abductee and he told me he will make efforts to resolve the issue," said Komura, whose ministry set up an emergency task force.
Nakamura, a sociology student at Yokohama National University "took a leave of absence from school from April 1 to September 30 to join a volunteer group involved in education," said Naomi Ishimoda, a university official.
"He arrived in Nepal on June 9 to teach English and Japanese at an elementary school there for two months."
He then crossed into Iran from Pakistan, public broadcaster NHK said.
"It is truly deplorable that this happened. We are making our utmost efforts in our foremost goal, which is to bring him back safely," Japan's chief government spokesman Nobutaka Machimura said.
Japan upgraded its travel advisory for southeastern Iran, recommending that its nationals postpone any trips to the area.
Tokyo has historically had cordial relations with Tehran, both before and after the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Japan has taken a lower profile than its Western allies in pressuring Tehran on its nuclear drive, although Tokyo last year pulled out of a project to develop Iran's largest onshore oil field.
Iranian security forces are frequently involved in deadly shootouts in the region with drug traffickers who use Iran as a transit point to bring drugs from Afghanistan into Europe.
Sistan-Baluchestan is also sometimes the scene of attacks by the Jundallah Sunni militant group, which was blamed for a deadly blast in Zahedan that killed 13 Iranian Revolutionary Guards earlier this year.
While most of the kidnappings of foreigners have had a happy ending, a German man was killed in 1999.
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