A Canadian journalist has described how Afghan kidnappers held her captive for four weeks in a cramped hole in the ground, sometimes chained and blindfolded, before releasing her unharmed this weekend.

Mellissa Fung, a journalist with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, was abducted by armed men at a refugee camp on the outskirts of Kabul on October 12 and taken to the mountains west of the city, according to a CBC statement.

Ms Fung – one of several journalists kidnapped in Afghanistan this year – was freed late on Saturday with the help of local tribal elders and handed to officials from Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security (NDS). Another, a Dutch woman, was also freed on Friday after ten days in captivity, but a male French aid worker kidnapped in Kabul last week is still missing.

The NDS released a video yesterday showing Ms Fung looking tired and wearing a camouflage jacket as she talked with the Canadian Ambassador and Amrullah Saleh, Afghanistan’s intelligence chief.

“I’m not smelling great,” she told the ambassador as he walked up to greet her with a hug. “I’m fine, really, I’m fine. I’m just happy to be here.”

Mr Saleh asked Ms Fung if her captors kept her in a house or in a well. “In a cave. It was very small,” she replied. “They dug a small hole . . . and the hole (entrance) was here, and then there was a little tunnel that went into the cave.” Mr Saleh asked: “Could you stand in the cave?” She replied: “Barely, and I am short.”

“They kept me blindfolded . . . not all the time,” she said. “For the first three weeks they had somebody with me the whole time, watching me. So they did not chain me. The last week they left me and chained me.”

The reporter said she was given packets of biscuits and juice once a day, and was able to wash with water from a well. “They never hurt me,” she said.

The NDS said she was freed without any ransom but did not say whether her abductors were members of a criminal gang or the Taleban.

Sayed Ansari, an NDS spokesman, said that three men had been arrested for the kidnap but they were only mid-level players and the kingpins – one of whom had left the country – were still being hunted.

Stephen Harper, the Canadian Prime Minister, also said that no ransom had been paid and declined to speculate about the identity of the kidnappers.

The Taleban has denied involvement in the kidnap, which was kept secret until Ms Fung’s release at the request of CBC so as not to jeopardise negotiations with her captors.

Security has deteriorated rapidly around Afghanistan over the past two years, and is now at its worst point since the Taleban government was toppled by a US-led invasion in late 2001.

However, violence against Westerners in the capital was relatively rare until a few weeks ago. An aid worker with dual South African-British citizenship was killed by Taleban gunmen in Kabul last month, and a few days later two Western employees of DHL, the courier company, were shot dead by a guard at their office who then turned the gun on himself. The violence against foreigners is attributed partly to the Taleban, which has increased its influence around Kabul this year and vowed to wage a winter campaign against the Government and its Western backers.

It has also been linked to a power struggle in the police after President Karzai’s appointment last month of an ethnic Pashtun with a reputation as an anticorruption campaigner as the new Interior Minister.

Two Spanish soldiers were killed and four wounded in a suicide attack south of Herat in western Afghanistan, a Spanish military spokesman said. A van containing explosives was driven into a joint Spanish and Afghan convoy. In eastern Khost province, US coalition forces killed 14 suspected militants who fired on them from their vehicle. The province’s governor claimed the men were construction workers, which the US denied.

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