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S Korea provided US$4 mln in ransom for hostages |
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Written by Administrator
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Sunday, 10 February 2008 09:17 |
SEOUL, Feb. 10 (Yonhap) -- South Korea paid at least US$4 million for the release of 21 South Korean Christian aid workers in Afghanistan held hostage by Taliban militia in August last year, Newsweek magazine reported in its latest edition.
The South Korean government has denied allegations that it made any payment to the Taliban rebels to win the release of the 21 evangelical missionaries held hostage in the war-torn Central Asian state while on a humanitarian mission. Two other Korean captives were executed just days after they were captured in July.
Seoul has said the captive Koreans were released on its promise to pull about 200 South Korean troops out of Afghanistan by the end of last year and ban any evangelical missions by South Korean Christians in the predominantly Islamic Central Asian state.
The weekly magazine, in its Feb. 6 edition, quoted an anonymous senior Taliban commander as saying that the South Korean government paid at least $4 million for the release of the South Koreans and that the cash was delivered to the insurgents in the Pakistani frontier city of Quetta.
The magazine cited another senior Taliban leader Ustad Yasir having said in this week's
edition of Afaq, a Pashtu-language magazine published in Pakistan, that "If we were going to free them without any payment, [the hostage taking] would not have been worth it. The best way to release them was with a ransom payment."
Another Taliban official said that 35 percent of the ransom went to the local insurgent group in Ghazni, where the Koreans were kidnapped, and that the rest were funneled to the ruling Taliban council presided over by Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar. (Yonhap)
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