June 23, 2008	Monday	Jamadi-us-Sani 18, 1429

PESHAWAR, June 22: Kidna-ppers freed 16 members of the Christian community to the tribal administration in Bara on Sunday morning — 13 hours after their kidnapping from Peshawar.

Siraj Khan, caretaker of some houses in Banarasabad in the Academy Town, where the kidnapped men live on rented premises, was not freed. About 500 Christian families live in the neighbourhood.

The NWFP chief minister ordered the removal of Peshawar police chief Attaullah Wazir and Senior Superintendent (Operations) Mohammad Imtiaz Shah and suspension of the entire staff of the Pishtakhara police station in the wake of the kidnapping.

According to a notification, DIG Mohammad Suleman has been posted as the city police chief and AIG Kashif Alam as SSP (Operations).

“The government wants to conduct an impartial inquiry to ascertain which officials were responsible for the security lapse,” provincial Information Minister Mian Iftikhar Hussain said at a joint press conference with Minorities Minister Nimroz Khan and leaders of the Christian community.

The freed people, including two priests, said they had been treated well during captivity at an unidentified location in the tribal region. They said the captors sported beards and had long hair.

“A local jirga negotiated with the kidnappers for the recovery of the kidnapped people,” political agent Khalid Kundi told journalists at the Khyber House.

He dispelled an impression that a militant organisation was involved in the incident. However, official sources believe that the Bara-based Lashkar-i-Islam was involved.

“We were about to start prayers at about 7pm on Saturday when armed men barged into the premises and started pushing us, whisking us into two double-cabin trucks parked nearby. Three other vehicles were parked at some distance,” said Salamat Massih, who had arranged a gathering at his home in connection with the birth of his granddaughter.

He told Dawn that he and the other kidnapped men were first driven to a building in the tribal region and then taken to a mountainous area. Salamat and another kidnapped man, Gulzar Massih, said they had not been informed about the motive behind the kidnapping.

Some of their neighbours said the premises in which they lived had once housed a seminary run by an Arab national. A few years ago, the Arab disappeared. Over the past couple of weeks, the residents and the caretaker had received threats from unknown people and told to vacate the place.