AMMAN, Nov 5: The director general of the International Committee of the Red Cross said here on Monday that the Taliban had approached the ICRC about handing over a body, after Taliban reports of a US fatality.

Paul Grossrieder also told a press conference that ICRC efforts to distribute food to the Afghan people were becoming increasingly difficult, especially after US bombings by mistake of ICRC food warehouses.

“We were approached by the Taliban to transmit to us a body,” the ICRC director general said in Amman, during a Middle East tour.

“I talked today to our director of information and he told me that, yes, we were approached. This means that we are in discussion but I have not yet, at least here now, confirmation whether we succeeded in these discussions.”

Grossrieder gave no further details.

The Taliban said on Sunday that a US citizen arrested in Afghanistan 10 days ago had died in hospital in Kandahar.

The agency quoted the Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, Abdul Salam Zaeef, as saying the body of the man, who had earlier identified himself as Mazhar Ayub, had been handed over to the Red Cross.

The AIP report, written in Urdu, provided a transliteration of what Zaeef said was Ayub’s real name, John Poletan, and said he had been arrested on Oct 26 and taken to Kandahar.

“He died in hospital on Sunday,” Zaeef said.

Later the deputy head of the ICRC delegation to Afghanistan, Pascal Duport, confirmed he had some knowledge of the case but that no body has been handed to the Red Cross.

The Taliban foreign ministry said in a statement on October 27 that a US national had been arrested in Spin Boldak, on the Afghan side of the Chaman border crossing with Pakistan.

Turning to the humanitarian situation inside Afghanistan, Grossrieder hoped for an end to the US strikes to allow the ICRC to resume its work soon, although he was “not optimistic”

Since the Taliban ordered all foreigners out of Afghanistan, the ICRC’s 60 international staff have been evacuated, leaving behind 1,000 locally-employed nationals, Grossrieder said.

“Because they are Afghans they have certain limitations in moving from one place to another and they have difficulties to cross lines for political reasons,” he said.

However, the local ICRC staff have been able to distribute food and medicine “to the most vulnerable people in Kabul, especially the handicapped,” he said.

But the US bombing, by mistake, at the end of October of ICRC warehouses was a major setback for the organisation’s efforts to carry out its humanitarian mission, he said.

“Our warehouses that contained about 15,000 tonnes of food were bombed by American planes. We asked for an explanation and we received regrets from the American authorities,” Grossrieder said.

“But this does not change the fact that we are now practically at the end of the possibility of helping people with food,” he said.

He said the foreign staff ordered out of Afghanistan were now deployed in neighbouring Iran, Pakistan, Tajikistan and Kazakhstan, “and they position equipment, food and medicine to be able to work as soon as possible”.

ICRC delegates are in contact with the “different parties in order to try to foresee within the conflictual situation the possibilities of having humanitarian space to work. This is what we are looking for,” he explained. —AFP