Pakistan Pressures Taliban to Hold onto 7 Indian Hostages

Pakistan’s ISI has reportedly pressure on Taliban to hold onto the 7 Indian engineers kidnapped in Afghanistan on Sunday.

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Pakistan’s ISI has reportedly pressure on Taliban to hold onto the 7 Indian engineers kidnapped in Afghanistan on Sunday.

The Indian power-line engineers kidnapped in Afghanistan over the weekend are now being held in the Taliban-controlled village of Dand-i Shahabuddin on the northern fringes of the town of Pul-i Khumri in Afghanistan’s Baghlan, senior government officials told Indian the Quint News service.

Using a committee of village elders and clerics from Dand-i Shahabuddin as mediators, local authorities have begun negotiations with Qari Bakhtiar – a Kunduz-area ethnic Pashtun who serves as the Taliban’s deputy chief for the Baghlan area – in an effort to secure the release of the men, the sources said

“Early on Sunday, Qari Bakhtiar said the kidnapping of the men was a mistake, and they would be released soon,” one senior Baghlan official who is familiar with the kidnapping said. “But later on Sunday, as the kidnapping acquired a higher media profile, negotiations stalled,” he added.
Afghanistan’s intelligence service, the National Directorate of Security, fears Bakhtiar’s Taliban unit may be under pressure from Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence to draw out the kidnapping, in a bid to force out Indian power companies from northern Afghanistan, another Afghan government official told the Quint.

India has always accused Pakistan of supporting terror groups, claiming that its interests and citizens are threatened by Pakistan.