Video: scene of the shooting in Kabul

Taleban militants shot dead a British woman in Kabul yesterday, claiming that she had been spreading Christianity.

Gayle Williams, 34, a worker for the Christian charity Serve Afghanistan, was shot by two men on a motorbike as she walked to work in the west of the city. She was found lying dead on the footpath by one of her colleagues.

“Our people carried out this attack in District 3 of Kabul this morning,” Zabiullah Mujahed, the Taleban’s spokesman, told The Times. “The reason that we killed her was because she was spreading Christianity.”

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A witness said that seven shots were fired. The Afghan Interior Ministry said: “Two armed men sitting on a motorbike shot her dead. Some bullets hit her body and some hit her leg and when police got there she was dead.”

Ms Williams, from London, had recently been pulled out from the charity’s office in Kandahar, in the south, because of security fears for foreign aid workers there. She is the first Western aid worker to be killed by the Taleban in Kabul.

Mike Lyth, the chairman of Serve Afghanistan, dismissed the Taleban’s claims that Ms Williams had been targeted for religious revenge, and said that the charity did not preach Christianity.

“Purely from my point of view, this is a case of the Taleban picking up on something,” he said. “They know we are a Christian agency. We definitely have a policy of no proselytisation . . . She was only doing missionary work if that means living a Christian life and helping disabled people. She spoke only a little Pashtun and Farsi.”

Describing Ms Williams as a “wonderful girl”, Mr Lyth added: “We are devastated by the loss of Gayle . . . She was a great adventurer who had done a lot of different things, but this is something where she really felt she had found her niche, working with Afghans.” She had varied her route to work each day.

He said that it was not clear whether the charity could continue to operate in the same way after the killing. Serve Afghanistan runs projects in Kabul, Kandahar and the north of the country helping the blind, deaf and physically handicapped.

Aid agencies have expressed unease at the deteriorating security situation in Afghanistan and last month called on the United Nations to provide security for aid workers.

“Aid agencies are now directly targeted by armed opposition groups in Afghanistan and access to communities in need is constantly shrinking,” they said.

According to the Afghanistan NGO Safety Office, there have been 146 security incidents involving nongovernment organisations working in Afghanistan so far this year, compared with 135 for last year. In August three female aid workers, including one Briton, were killed by the Taleban on a road south of Kabul.

Afghanistan’s Christian community is said to be very fragile, with a small number of churches operating in secret in Kabul. Alexa Papadouris, of Christian Solidarity Worldwide, said: “The estimates for the Afghan Christian community range between 500 and 8,000 . . . Converts are very vulnerable to being hunted down as apostates.”

Douglas Alexander, the International Development Secretary, said that the killing of Ms Williams was a “callous and cowardly act”. He added: “To present her killing as a religious act is as despicable as it is absurd – it was cold-blooded murder.”

Ms Williams grew up in South Africa but had been living in London when she started working for Serve Afghanistan two years ago.

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