Gunmen kidnap US aid expert in Pakistan

An American aid expert was kidnapped at gunpoint from his house in the Pakistani city of Lahore yesterday after gunmen stormed through the back door and overpowered his guards, police said.

The US embassy said the man, who police said was in his 60s, had been identified as Warren Weinstein and that he works for a private company.

He was snatched at dawn in the upmarket neighbourhood of Model Town, just two days before he was due to return to the US after more than four years in the deeply conservative nuclear-armed Muslim country of 167 million.

Police described how eight kidnappers forced their way into the house as Weistein’s guards ate a traditional pre-dawn meal at 3.30 a.m. before beginning the daily Ramadan fast of observant Muslims.

“Somebody knocked on the main door. According to one of the guards when he opened the door, he saw three men standing there. They offered meals to the guard, who politely refused,” police official Tajamul Hussain told AFP.

“Five more men climbed into the house using the back door, overpowered the guards and tied their hands behind their back.

“They asked Weinstein’s driver to knock on his bedroom door. When the US citizen opened the door, they snatched him,” Hussain said.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the kidnapping.

“We are working with local authorities on the investigation, and we also are in contact with next of kin and are providing the family with consular support,” State Department spokeswoman Joanne Moore told AFP.

Police refused to be drawn on possible motivation in a country where anti-American tensions are at an all-time high, and abductions involve both Al-Qaeda-linked militants and criminal gangs looking for pay-offs.

“We’re looking into all angles, whether it was ordinary case of ransom or whether it involves militants,” said Hussain.

Police said Weinstein had lived in Lahore since 2006, working for J.E. Austin Associates, which recently completed a development project in Pakistan’s north-western tribal belt, considered an Al-Qaeda headquarters by Washington.

“He was to return to the US on August 15 as his firm had completed the project in FATA,” Hussain told AFP, referring to the region by its official name the Federally Administered Tribal Areas.

According to its website, the Virginia-based J.E. Austin has completed more than 500 projects in 100 countries on behalf of clients all over the world, including the US Agency for International Development (USAID).

It describes Weinstein as an “expert in international development with 25 years experience”, who speaks six foreign languages and with a PhD in international law and economics from Columbia University.

Police said Weinstein travelled widely within Pakistan, and had returned to Lahore from Islamabad last Thursday.

Lahore is the capital of the eastern province of Punjab and considered one of Pakistan’s more liberal cities. Other Westerners abducted in recent years in Pakistan have been snatched in far more volatile parts of the country.

The US State Department last Monday revised its travel warning, saying that Americans throughout Pakistan have been kidnapped for ransom or for personal reasons.

Pakistani-US relations are in dire straits, set back seriously by Pakistan’s seven-week detention of a CIA contractor who killed two men in Lahore in January and the covert American raid that killed Osama bin Laden on May 2.

US citizen Raymond Davis was eventually released after $2 million in blood money was paid to the families of the dead, but the incident sparked huge anger in Pakistan and raised deep suspicions about covert CIA operations.

The bin Laden operation later humiliated the Pakistani military and invited allegations of incompetence and complicity, given that he had been living undetected only a two hour drive north of Islamabad for years.

Tensions are at an all-time high over US drone strikes against militants in the tribal belt, which Pakistan officially complains violate its sovereignty, and over US pressure on Islamabad to do more itself against militant networks.

On July 1, a Swiss couple were kidnapped on holiday in Baluchistan, a sparsely-populated south-western province bordering Iran and Afghanistan that attracts few tourists due to separatist violence and Taliban activity.

Wali-ur Rehman, deputy chief of Pakistan’s umbrella Taliban faction later claimed responsibility for that kidnapping.

In February 2009, an American UN official was also kidnapped and held for two months in Baluchistan.

US Senator John McCain was in Pakistan yesterday holding talks with Pakistani leaders.