Hostage

A year after the Taliban fell to an American-led coalition, a group of NATO ambassadors landed in Kabul, Afghanistan, to survey what appeared to be a triumph - a fresh start for a country ripped apart by years of war with the Soviets and brutal repression by religious extremists. With a senior American diplomat, R. Nicholas Burns, leading the way, they thundered around the country in Black Hawk helicopters with little fear for their safety. They strolled quiet streets in Kandahar and sipped tea with tribal leaders.

Thomas H. Farrow, a retired Baltimore FBI agent who talked a gun-wielding hijacker into a surrender aboard a jet, died of congestive heart failure Monday at Rockingham Memorial Hospital in Harrisonburg, Va. The former Marriottsville resident was 82. On Jan. 2, 1973, Mr. Farrow was called to Friendship Airport (now Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport) to investigate Flight 928. A hijacker armed with a .45-caliber automatic pistol had hidden in the washroom of a Piedmont jet that had landed after a stop in nearby Washington.

SEOUL, South Korea -- As the South Korean hostage crisis entered its third week, sympathy here for the 21 people remaining in Taliban captivity in Afghanistan has been tempered by anger over their decision to travel to such a dangerous region. "My friends and I first wondered, `Why did the church send those people to a place the government had advised them not to travel?'" said Shim Sae-rom, a political science major at Ewha Womans University in Seoul. "What were they thinking?" When 23 South Koreans, most of them women in their 20s and 30s, were kidnapped July 19, the Taliban took an entire society hostage.

KABUL, Afghanistan -- A man identifying himself as a Taliban spokesman said the insurgents had killed two German and five Afghan captives yesterday, adding that they also intended to kill 23 South Korean captives if their demand for the release of an equal number of Taliban prisoners was not met within 24 hours. The claim that seven hostages were dead could not be verified, and Afghanistan's Foreign Ministry denied the report, insisting that one of the German hostages had died of a heart attack and that the other was still alive.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- Fears deepened yesterday about the fate of hostages reportedly being held by Islamic militants inside a besieged radical mosque in the heart of the capital. As Pakistani troops encircled the Red Mosque for a fifth day, the cleric in charge declared that he hoped that the standoff, which has left at least two dozen people dead, would help trigger an Islamic revolution in Pakistan. It was not clear how many people were inside the mosque complex, which contains two madrassas, or seminaries, with an enrollment of about 5,000 students.

WASHINGTON -- An Oregon senator said yesterday that he intends to block the nomination of Maryland's former homeland security director to a senior Federal Emergency Management Agency post, in an attempt to force the Homeland Security Department to carry out an emergency response program that Congress ordered five years ago. The pawn in this Washington standoff is Dennis Schrader, who was homeland security director under Republican Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich...

KABUL, Afghanistan -- Three Afghan employees of a French aid organization, who had been held hostage for seven weeks by Taliban insurgents, were freed unharmed after local residents intervened, the governor of Nimruz province, Ghulam Dastagir Azad, said yesterday. The three men were kidnapped along with two French aid workers on April 3. They had been working on a project for A World for Our Children in Zaranj, in the far southwestern part of the country. The two French workers, a woman and a man, were freed separately in recent weeks, despite initial threats from the Taliban that they would kill them unless France withdrew its troops and ended its assistance to Afghanistan.

When Iranian human rights activist Shirin Ebadi won the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize, Iranian-American scholar Haleh Esfandiari remarked that the choice would improve Iran's image across the globe. The Islamic Republic, she said, "has been seen as this rogue state, a hostage taker. Now people will see the other side." Ms. Esfandiari was right on both counts, only now she is the hostage, held in a notorious Tehran prison on trumped-up charges, and Ms. Ebadi is preparing to fight for her release.

ROME -- An Italian journalist who was held hostage for 15 days by the Taliban in lawless southern Afghanistan was ransomed for five Taliban prisoners, the Italian government and Afghan officials confirmed yesterday. It appears to be the first time prisoners have been openly exchanged for a hostage in the wars that the United States and its allies are fighting there and in Iraq, and the move drew immediate criticism from Washington and London, and from other European capitals. "We don't negotiate with terrorists, and we don't advise others to do so, either," said the State Department spokesman, Sean McCormack.

The midshipman blurted out his question, interrupting a class discussion about tolerance of other cultures in the early days of Islam. "When did this fanaticism start?" asked John Kennedy, a Naval Academy senior. "Like when Iran's president says the Holocaust never happened or wants to nuke Israel and wipe it off the map?" The 22-year-old senior could not have picked a better man to ask. When Islamic revolutionaries stormed the U.S. Embassy in Iran in 1979, John W. Limbert Jr. was there, a middle-ranking diplomat who, unlike any of the CIA operatives in his company, spoke fluent Persian.