Pakistan looks for clues in US expert abduction

LAHORE, Pakistan - Pakistani police scrambled for leads on Sunday about an American aid expert kidnapped at gunpoint from his house in Lahore, interrogating his guards and combing their phone records for clues.

The US embassy named the man as Warren Weinstein, who Pakistani police said was the country director for the US-based consulting company J.E. Austin Associates, which works on development projects in this frontline state in the war against al-Qaida.

He was grabbed at dawn on Saturday in the wealthy neighborhood of Model Town, just two days before he was to return to the United States after living five years in Pakistan, a deeply conservative Muslim country.

No one has claimed responsibility for the kidnapping. Police in the neighborhood said they have no idea who was behind the deed.

They declined to speculate about a possible motive in a country where anti-American tensions are at a record high and abductions are being carried out by both militants linked to al-Qaida and criminal gangs.

Tahir Mehmood, a police official, described the kidnappers as young Urdu-speakers wearing Western-style shirts and pants, according to testimony from one of Weinstein's guards. One of them had a beard, the guard said.

He said the kidnappers tied him and his colleagues up, removed the SIM cards from their mobile phones and hit Weinstein in the head with a pistol to subdue him before taking him away.

"We have taken the mobile phones of the two security guards and are checking the call records," Mehmood said. "We are interrogating the security guards and doing a detailed background check on their past."

The large house has two gates and walls that are about 1.8 meters high, which could be climbed fairly easily, said an AFP reporter.

The street contains private security checkpoints, which are usually unmanned during the day. At night, watchmen hired by neighbors are on duty from dusk until dawn.

Few of the neighbors seemed to know that Weinstein had been living there.

One man said on the condition of being granted anonymity that he had only seen a foreigner in the street twice in six years.

"I thought it was some (nongovernmental organization's) office," he said. "Not many houses are given on rent in this area."

Police said eight kidnappers forced their way into the house as the guards ate a traditional pre-dawn meal before beginning the daily Ramadan fast practiced by Muslims.

Three men came to the front door offering food while five others climbed over the back wall. They overpowered the guards before ordering Weinstein's driver to knock on his bedroom door and wake him up.

The police said Weinstein had lived in Lahore since 2006, working for J.E. Austin Associates, which recently completed a development project in Pakistan's northwestern tribal belt.

Agence France-Presse

(China Daily 08/15/2011 page11)