Taliban Kills Three Aid Workers in Afghanistan

Three western women working for an American aid organization have been shot dead in a Taliban ambush in Afghanistan. The women - a British-Canadian, a Canadian and a Trinidadian - were traveling by car in the eastern Logar province when they were attacked yesterday morning. One Afghan driver was also killed and another seriously injured.

The women worked for the New York-based International Rescue Committee, which has now suspended all its humanitarian aid programs in Afghanistan.

A Taliban spokesman, Zahibullah Mujahed, claimed responsibility, telling the Associated Press news agency that the insurgents had targeted "the foreign invader forces".

The dead British-Canadian was Dr Jacqueline Kirk, the IRC said. The 40-year-old dual UK and Canadian citizen was a University of Ulster research fellow, affiliated to the university's International Conflict Research center at its Coleraine campus. George Rupp, president of IRC, said in a statement: "We are stunned and profoundly saddened by this loss."

Though raised in the UK, Kirk had moved to Quebec in Canada. She had wide experience working with aid organizations such as Unesco and Unicef in the Lebanon, Rwanda, Angola, Ethiopia and south Sudan. She had joined IRC in 2004 and been based at its New York offices.

The organization named the other victims of the ambush as Mohammad Aimal, 25, from Kabul, Afghanistan who had worked as a driver for the IRC since 2002, Nicole Dial, 30, who lived in Trinidad and Tobago, and had been a coordinator in the agency's programs for children, and Shirley Case, 30, of Williams Lake, British Columbia. She joined the IRC on June 8 in Afghanistan to manage education programs designed to meet the needs of children with disabilities.

The Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, described the attack as unforgivable. "It is not in our culture to kill women," he said in a statement. "This unforgivable incident without doubt was carried out by enemies of Afghanistan, by non-Afghans."

Abdullah Wardak, governor of Logar, said the women were traveling from the eastern city of Gardez to Kabul when their two vehicles were fired at by five gunmen.

Local aid workers have been regular targets of the insurgents who aim to halt development work which might aid the fragile government build its authority in rural areas. Nineteen Afghans working for NGOs have been killed so far this year.

Yesterday's attack was not the first time that insurgents have targeted IRC, which works on healthcare projects and provides returning refugees with shelter, water and sanitation. Three of its local offices have been destroyed since March. In 2007, two Afghans working for IRC were killed in an ambush, also in Logar province.

Violence in Afghanistan has reached its highest level since the end of the Taliban regime in 2001.