Taliban say kill hostage after demands are ignored

By Sayed Salahuddin

KABUL (Reuters) - Taliban kidnappers shot dead a male South Korean hostage on Monday, a spokesman for the group said, accusing the Afghan government of not listening to rebel demands for the release of Taliban prisoners.

"We killed one of the male hostages at 6.30 this evening (1400 GMT) because the Kabul administration did not listen to our repeated demands," spokesman Qari Mohammad Yousuf told Reuters by telephone from an unknown location.

The Taliban seized 23 Korean Christians, 18 of them women, 11 days ago from a bus in Ghazni on the main highway south from Kabul and killed the leader of the group on Wednesday after an earlier deadline passed.

The spokesman said the Taliban would kill more hostages if Kabul ignored their demand to release rebel prisoners but set no new deadline. He said the body of the Korean shot on Monday had been dumped on a roadside.

The shooting was a bloody rejection of the authorities' request for more time for talks on freeing the hostages after the expiry of a rebel deadline earlier in the day.

Al Jazeera television broadcast a video showing at least seven of the female hostages, wearing head scarves and apparently unharmed. Four were sitting on the ground, the rest standing beside men in Afghan robes, apparently militants.

The face of one Asian man also wearing traditional Afghan robes was shown, but it was not clear if he was a hostage or an insurgent.

Al Jazeera said it had obtained the footage "from a source outside Afghanistan."