February 3, 2003	Monday	Zilhaj 1,1423

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KABUL, Feb 2: The United Nations said on Sunday it was concerned about lack of security in Afghanistan after a series of armed attacks on aid workers.

UN officials said two cars belonging to aid workers were taken over at gunpoint in the past week, one in the western province of Farah last Monday and another just south of Kabul on Thursday. No workers were hurt in the incidents, but some were beaten, they said.

The incidents follow an attack on a UN refugee agency convoy last week in which two security men from the provincial administration were killed in the eastern province of Nangarhar and a bomb attack on an office of UN de-miners in the northern town of Mazar-i-Sharif, in which there were no injuries.

UN spokesman Manoel de Almeida e Silva told a news briefing that members of a demining team from the Mine Action Programme of Afghanistan were held up by 10 men armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles in the Abi Korma district of Farah province on Monday. He said they were beaten and robbed while being held for several hours.

Alejandro Chicheri of the World Food Programme told the same briefing that a WFP car was held up at Sheikabad south of Kabul on Thursday.

He said the occupants — two WFP staff, a worker from a non-governmental organisation and an Afghan government official — were blindfolded and held for four hours before being released unharmed. They later recovered their car from a nearby town with its radios missing, he said.

UN spokesman e Silva said the United Nations was concerned about the attacks.

“All of us who live in this country must be concerned about security conditions. The situation of the country is not yet stable: we have episodes of violence ranging from inter-factional fighting, to crime, to terrorism, and that is a concern.

“It is also a concern that in our view the perception of Afghans is that there is not as much security as they would like to see.”

Thousand of foreign military personnel, led by the United States, are currently in Afghanistan pursuing remnants of the former Taliban regime and their Al Qaeda allies blamed for the September 11, 2001 attacks on the New York and Washington.

They are joined by a 21-nation peacekeeping force currently about 4,000 strong, but its mandate is limited to the capital Kabul, in spite of calls from the United Nations and others for its role to be expanded into the provinces.—Reuters