PESHAWAR/ISLAMABAD: The deputy governor of Afgha­nistan’s Kunar province, Qazi Mohammad Nabi Ahmadi, was kidnapped from Peshawar’s Dabgari area on Friday, officials said.

Mr Ahmadi is a leader of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hizb-i-Islami which signed a peace deal with the Afghan government in September last year.

The local law enforcement agencies did not know about Mr Ahmadi’s visit until his abduction was reported by his relatives and the Afghan consulate in Peshawar took up the matter with Pakistani authorities.

Law enforcement agencies were not aware of Afghan official’s visit; abduction may be linked to internal Hizb-i-Islami rivalry

No group has claimed responsibility for his kidnapping. However, it is being speculated that the incident could be linked to a political rivalry or an operation against the militant Islamic State group taking place in the Afghan province where Mr Ahmadi is serving as the deputy governor.

A senior police official told Dawn that the deputy governor’s brother Habibullah had approached the police and told them that Mr Ahmadi had come to Peshawar for treatment of his kidney ailment.

The official said that the deputy governor did not possess a passport or other documents to validate his arrival in Peshawar. He had visited different parts of Peshawar, including Shahi Mehman Khana and Qinchi Chowk, before some unidentified people took him away in a car from the Dabgari area within the jurisdiction of the East police station to some undisclosed location.

The police official said that the complainant, Habibullah, had switched off his mobile phone and was not in contact to help investigate the matter. He said the Foreign Office and the Afghan consulate had not contacted the police so far in this regard.

“We are investigating the case to get any clue through closed-circuit television cameras at the Torkham border and other sources regarding the whereabouts of the deputy governor, who had not followed the legal procedure for coming to Peshawar,” the official said.

However, the officials at the East police station denied having any information about the deputy governor. “We have no information in this regard,” said an official at the police station.

The arrival of the deputy governor and his subsequent abduction raised questions about the alertness of the law enforcement agencies about the movement of Afghans, a security analyst said.

Hizb-i-Islami is internally facing a rift after Mr Hekmatyar’s decision to sign the peace deal with the Afghan government and his return to Kabul. Several key leaders of Hizb have since gone missing or have been killed including one in Peshawar in May this year. The Hizb man killed in Peshawar — Haji Farid — was a personal aide to Mr Hekmatyar and his son’s father-in-law.

Therefore, security analysts believe Mr Ahmadi’s abduction could also be a result of the political rivalry.

But at the same time they do not discount the possibility of involvement of the outlawed Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) in his kidnapping.

Kunar is also home to IS and TTP hideouts and a security operation against IS militants is under way in the deputy governor’s province in which several of its senior cadres have been killed. Therefore, some fear that the TTP, which is allied with the IS and forms its core fighting force, could have been involved in the kidnapping.

Last year, former governor of Afghanistan’s Herat province was also kidnapped from Pakistani capital Islamabad; he was later recovered by police from Mardan district.

Published in Dawn, October 29th, 2017