Taliban abducted Indian engineer

The Indian man, whose identity was not immediately available, was abducted from his car along with two guards and a driver from the Khash Rod district of Nimroz province late on Saturday, he said.

"We have him," Qari Mohammad Yousuf told Reuters by satellite phone from an undisclosed location. He gave no other details.

Afghan Interior Ministry spokesman Yousuf Stanezai confirmed the abduction, but did not know who the captors were.

The Taliban have kidnapped several Turkish and Indian engineers involved in roadworks in southern Afghanistan in the past years. One of the Turkish engineers was killed and the rest were freed, apparently after ransoms were paid.

Earlier three people were killed in volatile southern Afghanistan Saturday when a bomb blew up a car belonging to a former warlord who had laid down his arms, a provincial official said.

Militants loyal to the hardline Taliban regime that was toppled in a US-led operation in late 2001 claimed responsibility for the roadside blast in southern Helmand province. s

The unidentified commander was wounded, Helmand spokesman Mohammad Wali said.

The former warlord had been part of a UN disarmament programme launched after the fundamentalist Taliban government was removed after it did not hand over al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden for the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.

"We blew up the vehicle," purported Taliban spokesman Yousuf Ahmadi told reporters in a telephone call, accusing the one-time warlord of being too close to the government.

Helmand has seen several attacks linked to a Taliban-led insurgency and to its illegal drugs trade. The province contributes the most to Afghanistan's annual crop of around 4,000 tonnes (tons) of opium used to make most of the world's heroin.

A policeman and a suspected drug runner were killed in a gun battle in the province late Friday after police tried to hold up a five-vehicle convoy of smugglers, provincial governor Shir Mohammad told AFP.

Two other police officers were wounded. Police seized two tonnes of opium, several machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades, Mohammad said.

Twenty-eight Taliban and Islamic fighters surrendered to authorities in insurgency-hit Afghanistan Saturday and renounced any anti-government activities, an intelligence official said.

The 28 had returned to Afghanistan from exile in neighbouring Pakistan and gave themselves up in the eastern city of Gardez, the city's head of intelligence Ghulam Nabi Salim told AFP.

President Hamid Karzai declared jihad (holy war) on the drugs trade soon after he was elected in October last year. However, the involvement of powerful warlords has made it difficult for Karzai's nascent government to tackle the problem and opium production not been significantly cut.

Ahmadi also said the Taliban had carried out a suicide attack against US-led forces in the province on Saturday, but neither the coalition force nor the Afghan authorities confirmed any such attack.

There has been a spate of suicide blasts blamed on the Taliban this week. Two attacks against the Nato-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in the capital on Monday killed a German soldier and at least six Afghans.

The insurgency against the US-backed government has been the deadliest this year with close to 1,500 people killed, most of them militants.

Despite an apparent upsurge in violence, some Taliban and other Islamic fighters have accepted an offer of amnesty if they renounce their anti-government activities.

Twenty-eight former members of the Taliban and two Islamic militiamen surrendered in the eastern city of Gardez on Saturday after returning from neighbouring Pakistan, the city's head of intelligence Ghulam Nabi Salim told AFP.

More than 600 former Taliban fighters have taken up the offer announced in January.