THE Red Cross suspended its operations in Afghanistan yesterday after one of its foreign aid workers was shot dead by rebels in the troubled southeast of the country.

Ricardo Munguia, 39, an El Salvadorian citizen, was killed when gunmen intercepted two Red Cross vehicles on Thursday on a road to Kandahar as they returned from Tarin Kot in Oruzgan province. He was shot in the head and his vehicle set alight.

Two Afghan employees who accompanied Señor Munguia were allowed to go but were warned not to work for foreign agencies.

Señor Munguia, who worked as an engineer, is the first foreign aid worker to be killed in Afghanistan since the Taleban regime was defeated by a US-led military campaign.

“He was shot in cold blood,” Annick Bouvier, a spokeswoman for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), said in Geneva. Ms Bouvier said that the organisation had suspended operations across Afghanistan.

Jan Mohammad, the governor of Oruzgan, said: “The attackers pulled out the only foreigner in the convoy and in front of Afghan ICRC staff, executed him in cold blood with Kalashnikovs, calling him an infidel and unbeliever.

“No one else was killed, all the Afghans were spared. These were Taleban and supporters of al-Qaeda who committed this murder.”

Señor Munguia, who joined the ICRC in 1999, had worked for the organisation in Colombia and Africa. The ICRC has about 160 foreign workers providing medical aid, supervising development projects and monitoring international humanitarian agreements in Afghanistan.

Foreign aid organisations have complained about a lack of security, with increasing incidents of attacks on their employees working in areas controlled by warlords.

Several groups have withdrawn or reduced operations in northern Afghanistan after attacks and threats, including the rape last year of an American aid worker. Gunmen attacked a UN refugee agency convoy in eastern Afghanistan in January and killed two local security guards. The United Nations temporarily suspended road missions in several areas of eastern and southern Afghanistan on Thursday because of security concerns.

Manoel de Almeida e Silva, a UN spokesman, said that the suspensions covered several districts of Zabul province, including the areas close to Kandahar province where US forces are pursuing remnants of the ousted Taleban regime.

It is not yet clear who was responsible for the murder of Señor Munguia, but the Taleban and forces loyal to the rebel Afghan leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar are reported to have increased their activities in the region.

A recent statement purportedly issued by Mullah Omar, the fugitive chief of the Taleban movement, had called on his supporters to kill foreign aid workers and Afghans working for them.

This latest attack on a foreign aid worker came as the US troops in Afghanistan launched a second major operation with an air assault on mountains in the northeast. Last week hundreds of US soldiers combed mountain caves and villages in the former Taleban stronghold of southern Kandahar.

Omar Samad, an Afghan Foreign Ministry spokesman, expressed regret. “We wanted to express the Afghan Government’s sorrow at this brutal death,” he said. “The Afghan Government and people have always appreciated the hard work of organisations like the ICRC.”

Much of Afghanistan is controlled by local warlords and aid groups have complained of a lack of safety.

Rafael Robillard, a spokesman for the Agency Co-ordinating Body for Afghan Relief, an umbrella group for aid groups, said: “For us, this is pretty bad news and it does indicate the country is not as safe as it should be. Several aid agencies have already pulled out, and more could withdraw in light of this.”

He said that he could not speculate if Thursday’s attack was a reaction to US-led military action in Iraq, but there are concerns that the war will provoke an extremist Afghanistan backlash. Kabul says that it has not noticed an increase in hostility beyond an initial “flurry” of activity in response to the Iraq conflict.

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