The husband of a British aid worker gunned down in Afghanistan with three colleagues has claimed that her killers knew she was from a humanitarian organisation.

Dr Jacqueline Kirk, a University of Ulster research fellow, was one of four International Rescue Committee workers killed yesterday when their cars were ambushed in Logar province.

The IRC has now suspended all its Afghan aid programmes indefinitely. Other aid agencies in the area have restricted staff movements and were today meeting with a United Nations special envoy to discuss their concerns about the rising tide of violence against aid workers.

The Taleban claimed responsibility for the killings, saying that its Islamic insurgents fired on a two-vehicle convoy in Logar which was carrying "military personnel, most of them female".

But Mrs Kirk's husband, Andrew, said that the cars were covered in IRC stickers and whoever killed her would have known she was unarmed.

"They were travelling in white Toyota Land Cruisers that were clearly marked as IRC vehicles, as humanitarian vehicles," said Mr Kirk, a research scientist.

"Their policy was never to travel with weapons in the car so there wouldn’t be any doubt that they’re a peaceful humanitarian organisation."

The sole survivor of the attack, the Afghan driver in the second car, has told how five gunmen armed with assault rifles stepped out of a small village area and fired at the group’s vehicles, riddling them with hundreds of bullets.

At Logar province’s Pul-e-Alam hospital, Dr Mir Mabub Shah said that all four bodies had multiple bullet wounds. Three female Afghan nurses were covering the three victims in a white cloth shroud as they placed them in wooden coffins.

Abdurrahman Khan, an IRC driver, sobbed as he loaded two of the bodies onto the back of a truck at the hospital. "They were here helping Afghan people," the driver said. "They were not carrying weapons."

Dr Kirk, said to be of dual UK and Canadian descent, had wide experience working with aid organisations such as Unesco and Unicef in troubled areas of the world such as the Lebanon, Rwanda, Angola, Ethiopia and southern Sudan.

Professor Alan Smith, chairman of the University of Ulster’s Unesco centre at Coleraine, Co Londonderry, paid tribute to Dr Kirk, who spent six months as part of her post-doctoral research fellowship at the centre in 2005.

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