Jihadists give Britain and UN 3 days to leave Afghanistan or hostages die

They wouldn't kidnap anyone, you know, were it not for the fact that they have been shown that kidnappings work. From the Times Online, :

MILITANTS holding the British aid worker Annetta Flanigan and two United Nations colleagues in Afghanistan have threatened to kill them within three days unless British troops and the UN quit the country.

Ms Flanigan, from Northern Ireland, Angelito Nayan, a Filipino, and Shqipe Habibi from Kosovo, were shown in a video aired on Arab television yesterday.

It showed the hostages huddled together with their backs against a wall and a militant masked with a chequered scarf standing beside them. It bore the disturbing hallmarks of videos produced by insurgents and foreign fighters in Iraq, raising fears that militants in Afghanistan might be adopting the tactics that have scared off aid workers there.

Ms Flanigan and her colleagues were seized at gunpoint from their vehicle on Thursday, moments after they left their compound in Kabul, the first such kidnapping of its kind in Afghanistan.

Jaish-e-Muslimeen, a Taleban splinter group, claimed that it had seized the three, who were in Afghanistan working on last month’s presidential elections. In a series of phone calls to news organisations yesterday, a spokesman for the group said that the hostages would be killed if their demands were not met by noon on Wednesday. “They have to comply with our demands in three days, otherwise we will kill these three,” Ishaq Manzoor told the Associated Press. “Like in Iraq, the UN has to leave.”

He also called for the release of all Muslim prisoners from Guantanamo Bay and the US military base at Bagram, north of Kabul.