South Korea paid Afghanistan’s Taliban more than $20-million to release 19 missionaries they were holding hostage, a senior insurgent leader said on Saturday, vowing to use the funds to buy arms and mount suicide attacks.
The freed hostages flew out of Afghanistan on Friday to Dubai en route for South Korea. Seoul has denied paying a ransom, but critics say negotiating with the Taliban sets a dangerous precedent that could spur more kidnappings — which the Taliban have vowed to carry out.
”We got more than $20-million from them [the Seoul government],” the commander told Reuters on condition of anonymity. ”With it we will purchase arms, get our communication network renewed and buy vehicles for carrying out more suicide attacks.”
”The money will also address to some extent the financial difficulties we have had,” he said, but did not elaborate.
The commander is on the 10-man leadership council of the Islamist Taliban movement, which is led by the elusive Mullah Mohammad Omar.
He rejected an Afghan government claim that a senior Taliban leader, Mullah Brother, was killed in a United States-led operation on Thursday in the southern province of Helmand.
”This report is just propaganda,” he said.
The South Korean Christian volunteers, part of a group of 23 missionaries kidnapped in south-east Afghanistan in mid-July, arrived in Dubai on a chartered United Nations plane overnight and were due to fly on to Seoul on Saturday.
The Taliban killed two male hostages, while two women released earlier as a goodwill gesture have already flown home.
Some of the released hostages on Friday told of how they lived in constant fear for their lives and were split up into small groups and shuttled around the Afghan countryside to avoid detection.
One Taliban member would tend to a farm by day and then grab a rifle and stand guard over hostages at night.
The kidnapping was the largest in the resurgent Taliban campaign against foreign forces since US-led troops ousted the Islamists from power in 2001.
The Taliban decided to free the hostages after Seoul agreed to pull all its nationals out of the central Asian country. Some Afghan officials had said South Korea also agreed to pay a ransom during negotiations with the Taliban, which the insurgents confirmed — and South Korea denied.
Seoul had already decided before the crisis to pull its 200 engineers and medical staff out of Afghanistan by the end of this year. Since the hostages were taken, it has banned its nationals from travelling there. – Reuters