Pakistan Draws Blank on American Kidnap
Pakistani police scrambled for leads Sunday on an American aid expert kidnapped at gunpoint from his house in Lahore, interrogating his guards and combing their phone records for clues.
The U.S. embassy named the man as Warren Weinstein, who Pakistani police said was the country director for U.S.-based consultancy J.E. Austin, which works on development projects in the frontline state in the war on al-Qaida.
He was snatched at dawn on Saturday in the wealthy neighborhood of Model Town, just two days before he was due to return to the United States after five years in the deeply conservative nuclear-armed Muslim country of 167 million.
There has been no claim of responsibility. Police in the neighborhood told Agence France Presse that they had no idea who was behind the kidnapping.
They refused to be drawn on the possible motive in a country where anti-American tensions are at an all-time high, and abductions involve both al-Qaida-linked militants and criminal gangs looking for pay-offs.
Police official Tahir Mehmood described the kidnappers as young Urdu-speakers wearing Western-style shirts and trousers, based on witness testimony from one of Weinstein's guards. One of them had a beard, he added.
The guard said the kidnappers tied them up, removed the SIM cards from their mobile phones, and hit Weinstein in the head with a pistol to subdue him before taking away, police said.
"We have taken the mobile phones of the two security guards and are checking the call records," Mehmood said. "We are interrogating the security guards and doing a detailed background check on their past."
The large house has two gates and walls around six feet high, which could be climbed fairly easily, said an AFP reporter.
There are private security checkpoints in the street, which are typically unmanned during the day until nightwatchmen hired by the neighbors come on duty from dusk until dawn.
Few of the neighbors seemed to have any idea that Weinstein had been living there.
One man told AFP on condition of anonymity that he had only seen a foreigner in the street twice in six years.
"I thought it was some NGO office. Not many houses are given on rent in this area," he said.
Police said eight kidnappers forced their way into the house as the guards ate a traditional pre-dawn meal at 3:30 am (2230 GMT Friday) before beginning the daily Ramadan fast of observant Muslims.
Three men came to the front door offering food while five others climbed over the back wall, and they overpowered the guards before ordering Weinstein's driver to knock on his bedroom door and wake him up.
"My information is there is no clue yet," police official Jamshed Ahmed told AFP, deployed to guard the house with five others.
The U.S. State Department says it is working with the Pakistani authorities in the investigation.
Police said Weinstein had lived in Lahore since 2006, working for J.E. Austin Associates, which recently completed a development project in Pakistan's northwestern tribal belt, considered an al-Qaida headquarters by Washington.
Lahore is the capital of the eastern province of Punjab and considered one of Pakistan's more liberal cities. Other Westerners abducted in recent years in Pakistan have been snatched in far more volatile parts of the country.
Pakistani-U.S. relations are in dire straits, set back seriously by Pakistan's seven-week detention of a CIA contractor who killed two men in Lahore in January and the covert American raid that killed Osama bin Laden on May 2.
U.S. citizen Raymond Davis was eventually released after $2 million in blood money was paid to the families of the dead, but the incident sparked huge anger in Pakistan and raised deep suspicions about covert CIA operations.
Washington last Monday revised a travel warning, saying that Americans throughout Pakistan have been kidnapped for ransom or for personal reasons.