UN Seeks Contact With Pakistan Captors Of Official

An unknown separatist group, Baluchistan Liberation United Front (BLUF), has claimed responsibility for the abduction.

The United Nations said on Saturday it wanted direct contact with the kidnappers of an official from its refugee agency in southwestern Pakistan to try to secure his release.

John Solecki, head of the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Quetta, capital of the southwestern Baluchistan province, was kidnapped on Feb. 2 after gunmen ambushed his car and shot dead his driver.

The kidnappers released a video of the American on Friday to local media in which he asked the U.N. to help secure his release. Solecki was blindfolded and said he was unwell.

The kidnappers said in a hand-written letter with the video it would kill Solecki if the government failed to release its activists from jail within 72 hours.

"The U.N. remains extremely concerned about John's state of health, and would like to establish direct contact with those who are keeping him," the U.N. said in a statement.

"The United Nations is aware of the demand relayed through the media, and also seeks urgent contact to discuss ways of securing his safe release as soon as possible."

Pakistan's interior ministry said the government was doing all it could to secure Solecki's safe release. "We have got important indications and leads," he told reporters in Quetta without elaborating.

An unknown separatist group, Baluchistan Liberation United Front (BLUF), has claimed responsibility for the abduction.

The group has not been heard of before. Its name is similar to that of the well known Baluchistan Liberation Front.

Baluchistan, the largest but poorest of Pakistan's four provinces, lies on the border with Afghanistan. Separatist militants have fought a low-scale insurgency in the province for decades.

Militants loyal to al Qaeda and the Taliban are also involved in violence in Baluchistan and the North West Frontier Province, also on the Afghan border.

Islamist militants last week released a tape of them cutting off the head of a Polish geologist, Piotr Stanczak, whom they had kidnapped in September.

Islamist militants in the northwest are also believed to have kidnapped a Chinese engineer, and are holding an Afghan and an Iranian diplomat kidnapped several months ago.

Gunmen shot dead an American aid official outside his home in the northwestern city of Peshawar in November and killed his driver. In August, a U.S. diplomat escaped unharmed when gunmen ambushed her vehicle in Peshawar.

The United Nations ordered the children of foreign staff to leave Pakistan in October after a suicide truck-bomb attack on the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad killed 56 people, including six foreigners.