Persecution

A British female aid worker shot dead on the street in Kabul this morning had only recently been pulled back to the Afghan capital because of security fears over her charity’s Kandahar office.

Taleban militants who claimed responsibility for the shooting accused her of spreading Christianity. Ms Williams worked with the Christian charity Serve Afghanistan . Mike Lyth, the charity’s chairman, today paid tribute to Gayle as a "wonderful girl" who had found her niche in life through her charity work.

Another member of the charity's staff had found her lying on the footpath soon after the attack, he said, but she was already dead.

"We are devastated by the loss of Gayle, who was a lovely girl," said Mr Lyth. "She was part South African, part British, and based in the UK. Her mother is based in the UK. She was a great adventurer who had done a lot of different things in her life, but this is something where she really felt she had found her niche, working with Afghans."

Mr Lyth said that it was not clear whether the charity could continue to operate in the same way after the killing.

He dismissed the Taleban's claims to have targeted Ms Williams for religious revenge as "opportunistic", saying that Ms WIlliams had only recently arrived in Kabul and had changed her route to work every day. He also denied that Serve preached Christianity.

"There were rumours that had come through the security organisation that (the Taleban) were going to target foreigners in Kandahar, so we decided that discretion was the better part of valour and pulled her back to Kabul," he said.

"In Serve, everyone varies their route to work. Daily, that changes. I suspect that this is just an opportunistic claim, as she was taking different ways to work every day.

"Purely from my point of view, this is a case of the Taleban picking up on something. They know we are a Christian agency. We definitely have a policy of no proselytisation, but acting out of the love of Christ for people. We have a policy of not (preaching Christianity), so she certainly wasn't involved in that.

“She was only doing missionary work if that means living a Christian life and helping disabled people. She spoke only a little Pashtun and Farsi."

Miss Williams grew up in South Africa but was living in London when she started working for Serve Afghanistan two years ago. Her mother lives in London and her sister in South Africa.

Her murder was the first killing of a Western aid worker in Kabul, despite several deaths elsewhere in the country. The Foreign Office said that her next of kin had been informed.

A spokesman for the Taleban claimed responsibility. "Our people carried out this attack in District 3 of Kabul this morning at 7am," the Taliban's spokesman Zabiullah Mujahed told The Times. "The reason that we killed her was because she was spreading Christianity."

The Afghan Interior Ministry said that the killers fled immediately after the attack. "Two armed men sitting on a motorbike shot her dead. Some bullets hit her body and some hit her leg and when police got there she was dead," Zmarai Bashary, a spokesman, said.

Serve Afghanistan is a UK-registered charity with its head office in Kabul. According to Mr Lyth it has 15 expatriate staff in Afghanistan – a mix of Britons, Americans, Dutch, German, Swiss and Korean staff who between them have a number of children in the country – in addition to 300 Afghan workers. It runs projects in Kabul, Kandahar and the north of the country helping blind, deaf and physically handicapped Afghans.

A witness claimed that he had seen the woman walk the same route to work in the western Karte-Char suburb for about two years - although the fact that Ms Williams had only recently arrived from the Kandahar office appeared to cast doubt on this claim.

A labourer working close to the scene of the attack said he heard seven shots. When he reached the scene he saw a woman lying on a footpath.

Douglas Alexander, the International Development Secretary, condemned the Taleban’s attempt to justify the murder.

“Her killing was a callous and cowardly act by people who would take Afghanistan back to the dark days of the Taleban tyranny which scarred the country for so long," said Mr Alexander.

“Gayle and thousands of others like her are in Afghanistan to help ease the grinding poverty which afflicts millions of people. To suggest her killing was a religious act is as despicable as it is absurd. It was cold-blooded murder.”

Western aid agencies have expressed unease at the spreading insecurity in the country in recent months. There have been 146 security incidents involving non-governmental organisations working in Afghanistan so far this year, compared to 135 for the whole of last year, according to the Afghanistan NGO Safety Office which monitors NGO security.

Twenty-eight aid workers have been killed, among them five internationals, so far this year. There have also been 72 abductions of aid workers.

Three female aid workers from the International Rescue Committee, including a British national, Jacqueline Kirk, were killed by Taleban militants in an ambush on a road south of Kabul in August.

There have been three murders of prominent Afghans in Kandahar in recent weeks, also carried out by men on motorbikes. The Taleban claimed responsibility for two of the killings, involving the city’s most senior policewoman and a government official. The third was of a top tribal elder shot dead with his son, a former bodyguard of President Hamid Karzai, as they left a mosque early in the morning.

"Then shall they deliver you up to be afflicted, and shall kill you: and ye shall be hated of all nations for my name's sake." Mat 24:9