more about KASH

The NUJ have created a message board page on their site where people can post comments of support for the release of Kash freelance photojournalist http://www.kashgt.co.uk/
http://www.nujphoto.org/

This is the latest press release from Reporters Without Borders and a correction to the exact date he was captured - 12 October 2006.

Reporters Without Borders

Press releases

15 October 2006

AFGHANISTAN

Italian freelance photographer seized by armed men


Reporters Without Borders said today it was "very concerned" about the
kidnapping of an Italian photographer, Gabriele Torsello, in southern
Afghanistan and called for his immediate release.


"He is not a spy or a bargaining chip, but a courageous journalist who has
lived among the Afghan people for several months," the worldwide press
freedom organisation said, calling on the authorities and the country's
religious leaders to make every effort to obtain his release.


Torsello, a freelance, was seized by five armed men from a bus on his way
from Lashkar Gah to Kandahar on 12 October. The online news website Peace
Reporter, which disclosed the kidnapping, said he had managed the same day
to phone the head of security at a hospital in Lashkar Gah run by the
Italian NGO Emergency to ask him to assure the kidnappers of his "good
intentions" and that he had converted to Islam.


The independent Afghan news agency Pajhwok quoted an Afghan journalist who
had been travelling with him as saying he had called Torsello's mobile phone
and that a man had answered and said "We are the Taliban and we have
kidnapped the foreign spy." The Italian foreign ministry said today it was
treating the incident as a kidnapping.


Mullah Dadullah, a Taliban military chieftain, threatened on 4 September to
kill journalists who published news put out by the NATO forces in
Afghanistan. "We have an Islamic right to kill such reporters," he said.


Torsello, who has worked as a photojournalist around the world for the past
decade, has been in Afghanistan for several months, wearing a black beard
and Afghan clothes. He is married with one child, has converted to Islam and
is based in London.