The United Nations started evacuating “non-essential” staff from Kabul yesterday after the Taleban killed five of its foreign employees at an international guesthouse in the deadliest attack yet on the UN in Afghanistan.

Ban Ki Moon, the UN secretary-general, said the organisation might move UN staff now living in guesthouses in Kabul and elsewhere into more secure compounds, and hire private contractors to guard them.

Mr Ban met the 15-nation UN Security Council last night to appeal for help in protecting UN staff, and plans to address the 192-nation General Assembly to ask for “expedited action” on funding.

After an emergency meeting to review security the UN stopped short of withdrawing completely from Afghanistan, as it did in Iraq in the wake of a truck bomb that killed 22 people at its headquarters in Baghdad in 2003.

Kai Eide, the UN chief in Afghanistan, had pledged after Wednesday’s attack that the UN would not be deterred from its work, which includes funding and helping to organise an election run-off on November 7. The official conclusion of the meeting was that individual UN agencies should decide whether to advise staff to take leave, according to two participants.

UN officials told The Times that many of the roughly 1,000 foreign UN staff not working directly on the election had been instructed to leave for the next three weeks because of the security threat in Kabul.

“The problem is the places where we live,” one said. “No one feels safe.” Most of the foreign UN staff in Kabul live in small hotels and guesthouses like the one that was attacked by the Taleban on Wednesday. UN staff were concerned that the Taleban appeared to have detailed information about the guesthouse.

Aleem Siddique, a UN spokesman, said that staff were being encouraged to take leave just as they were during the first round of the poll.

“We are not evacuating,” he said. “We’ve been here for half a century and we’re not going any time soon.” He said that Mr Eide had specifically avoided using the term “evacuate” and left it to individual UN agencies to decide whether their staff should leave.

However, almost all UN agencies have told their staff to leave. “There’s real concern among the UN agencies that they’re going to be exposed to many risks because there’s an unclear decision on whether they should stay or go,” one UN insider told The Times.

Most aid agencies declined to discuss their security arrangements but one NGO said that about 15 of its 20 foreign staff in Kabul had left the city. Acted, the French aid agency, said that it had withdrawn four out of eight foreigners in Kabul.

This year 23 aid staff were killed, according to Acbar, an organisation for more than 100 Afghanistan NGOs.

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