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Taliban offer £30,000 a head to kill reporters

Taliban offer £30,000 a head to kill reporters

Author: Ian Traynor
Publication: The Guardian, UK
Date: November 30, 2001

Mullah Omar offer as media deaths mount

Mullah Mohammed Omar has promised Afghans blood money for the murder of western journalists. With the roads of Afghanistan becoming ever more perilous for the huge international media presence in the country to report the war, the Taliban leader announced a bounty of $50,000 (£30,000) to any Afghan gunmen who shoot a western journalist.

The chilling incentive to murder came shortly after incidents at opposite ends of the country, with the killing of one European journalist in the Northern Alliance-held north and the kidnapping and reported torture of a North American journalist in the south, near the Taliban and Omar stronghold of Kandahar.

Mullah Omar's offer was coupled with his attempt to rally the dwindling ranks of his Taliban hard core into standing and fighting the Americans who are increasing their firepower at an air base outside Kandahar.

Government officials in Tajikistan, the main point of departure for journalists trying to enter Afghanistan, and European diplomats said they were taking the Taliban leader's offer seriously and viewed it as an ominous sign.

"It's getting more dangerous and unpredictable," said a European ambassador. Senior officials at the Tajik defence ministry echoed that view.

While the allied forces' casualty count from almost two months of war is one death, eight journalists have been killed in Afghanistan in three weeks.

Mullah Omar's incitement to murder came as the corpse of Ulf Strömberg, a Swedish television journalist robbed and shot dead in the middle of the night in the northern town of Taloqan on Tuesday, rested in a Dushanbe morgue yesterday awaiting transfer to Stockholm.

Scores of journalists based in Taloqan beat a hasty retreat to Dushanbe shocked by the killing and to register protest with the victorious Northern Alliance commanders who failed to guarantee security.

General Rashid Dostam, the Uzbek warlord whose forces have vanquished the Taliban in the north, refused to offer security assurances for departing media convoys on the increasingly lawless roads and made veiled threats against the journalists seeking to leave Taloqan and Kunduz which fell to his forces this week.

If Mullah Omar's reward offer was mainly directed at loyal Taliban gunmen in a part of the country where the media presence is thin or non-existent, parts of the north under Northern Alliance control are increasingly bandit-infested and lawless, hampering the badly-needed delivery of aid.

One passenger in a United Nations aid vehicle was wounded on Tuesday when six gunmen opened fire on the car beyond Jalalabad east of Kabul.

"Security on the roads inside Afghanistan remains a huge problem," said the UN refugee agency.

Northern Alliance officials in control of Kabul are resisting pressure for international peacekeepers in Afghanistan, arguing that the situation is secure.

But more than 100 US army troops have just been deployed from neighbouring Uzbekistan to Mazar-i-Sharif in the north for security patrols and the UN spokesman in Kabul, Khaled Mansour, said Ulf Strömberg's killing demonstrated that the situation in Afghanistan was "too dangerous for the media and aid workers to do their jobs."

He singled out Northern Alliance-controlled Mazar-i- Sharif and Kunduz in the north as well as the last Taliban bastion of Kandahar as being particularly plagued by banditry.
 


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