According to the Afghan police, two Afghan and two foreign employees of the International Committee of the Red Cross, or ICRC, have been abducted in the Afghan province of Wardak near Kabul.

The police says that the Red Cross employees were kidnapped on a main road as they were travelling back to the capital late on Wednesday and said it was seeking their release.

The ICRC earlier admitted that its staff members were missing but declined to confirm they had been kidnapped. Anna Schaaf, a spokeswoman for the ICRC in Geneva, said the organisation was very concerned about their staff:

"For the time being all we know is that there is team of four of our employees that went missing when they came back from Kabul. We don’t know yet what has happened to them."

Series of kidnappings

There has been a series of kidnappings of both foreigners and Afghan nationals in Afghanistan in recent months. Responsibility has been claimed in part by Taliban insurgents and other attacks have been blamed on criminals seeking ransoms.

The Red Cross said that their staff members were on a mission to facilitate the release of a German hostage and five Afghans, who have been held by the insurgents for the past few months. But the ICRC did stress it was not making a link between this mission and the disappearance of the four employees.

The Geneva-based organisation employs 60 expatriates and more than 1000 Afghan nationals in Afghanistan, which is one of the Red Cross' biggest operations world-wide.

Facilitating role

Last month, the ICRC played a crucial role in facilitating talks between the Taliban and the South Korean government that led to the release of more than 20 Korean hostages after more than a month of captivity.

"The ICRC has not been involved in the negotiation of people abducted there. The ICRC is just intervening as a neutral inter-mediatory in case the request comes from all the parties concerned," said Schaaf.

Meanwhile, NATO troops have intensified their offensive in the country’s southern Helmand province, which is a Taliban stronghold. An overnight operation near the Pakistan border killed at least 18 Taliban militants, while two Danish soldiers were killed in an attack by insurgents in the South.