A breakaway Taleban group said Friday it had abducted three foreign UN workers from Kabul because they assisted Afghanistan's "fake election" and threatened to kill them if a rescue mission was launched.
"Our group has captured the three foreign infidels and we are keeping them at a safe place. So far they are safe," Mullah Mohammad Ishaq, a spokesman for the Jaishul-Muslameen (Army of Muslims) group, told AFP by cellphone.
"But if any forces are used against us to free them, those forces will be responsible for whatever harm that will come to the lives of the hostages."
The UN workers - a British-Irish woman, a Kosovar woman and a Filipino diplomat - were pulled from their UN-marked car by armed men wearing military-style jackets and bundled into a black four-wheel drive on Thursday afternoon.
The four-wheel-drive was later seen speeding towards the Paghman valley, notorious for banditry and past kidnappings of Afghans.
As Ishaq spoke, hundreds of Afghan police from a newly-trained commando unit scoured the Paghman valley west of Kabul in a desperate hunt for the trio.