Kabul: A female Western aid worker was shot dead in the Afghan capital Kabul early today by two men on motorbikes, the Afghan interior ministry told AFP. The nationality of the woman, who was gunned down as she was going to work, was not immediately clear, ministry spokesman Zemarai Bashary said.
"Two armed men sitting on a motorbike shot her dead. The perpetrators have run away and the police are working to find them," he said.
"Some bullets hit her body and some hit her leg and when police got there she was dead."
The woman apparently worked for a non-government organisation that was helping the disabled. The motive for the attack in the west of Kabul was not clear and police were investigating who was responsible, Bashary said.
It is rare that foreign nationals are killed in the Afghan capital. There have been three assassinations in the southern city of Kandahar in the past week also carried out by men on motorbikes.
The extremist Taliban group claimed responsibility for two of the killings involving the city s most senior policewoman and a government official.
The third was of a top tribal elder shot dead with his son, a former bodyguard of President Hamid Karzai, as they left a mosque early in the morning.
An NGO security group said last week attacks on aid workers by insurgents in Afghanistan are at the highest level in six years.
There had been 146 security incidents involving non-government organisations to September this year compared to 135 for the whole of 2007,the Afghanistan NGO Safety Office (ANSO) said in a quarterly report.
