The group was traveling on the highway that connects the capital Kabul with the southern city of Kandahar when armed Taliban fighters stopped the car and kidnapped them.

"Armed men took over their vehicle, disarmed the police and drove away the seven, leaving the empty-handed police in the area," a local police chief told AFP news service. Other reports have said that a total of eight people had been kidnapped.

Unknown hostages, kidnappers


A spokesman for the Afghan interior ministry said that a search operation has been launched, but that it remains unclear who kidnapped the group. German officials said that the German embassy in Kabul was also working to find out what happened.

While some officials said that Taliban fighters must have been involved, a Taliban spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, told AFP via phone from an unknown location that he could not confirm this.

UN spokesman Adrian Edwards in Kabul meanwhile denied that the Germans had been working for the world organization.

Germans targeted

The kidnapping comes less than a month after a German and his Afghan translator were kidnapped in southwestern Afghanistan and released unharmed about a week later.

Last October, two German freelance journalists who also worked for Deutsche Welle were shot dead in the relatively safe northern part of the country, where around 3,000 German soldiers were deployed as part of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).