Kidnapped ZUMA Photojournalist Says He’s Okay

 

DANA POINT, CA (October 18, 2006) – ZUMA Press said today that ZUMA photojournalist Kash Gabriele Torsello, who was kidnapped in Afghanistan on October 12 by five gunmen, appears to have made several cell phone calls to an Italian NGO medical group in Afghanistan since his abduction, and that Torsello says that he is well and that his kidnappers are moving him around to different locations.

“Torsello has been working with the Italian group Emergency, an NGO that likes to build little clinics and staff them, and he’s been doing some shooting with them,” Scott Mc Kiernan, ZUMA founder and director, said today. Torsello recently signed with ZUMA to represent him. “He told me about a month ago he was going to Afghanistan, and he likes to cover medical issues. He was going to Kandahar to do some other stuff when he was kidnapped. After he was kidnapped, the abductors used his cell phone to call the Emergency clinic and that’s when they told them that they wanted to make an exchange.”

The kidnappers appear to be offering to free the kidnapped Italian photographer, who is a convert to Muslim, in exchange for a Christian convert Abdul Rahman, who fled Afghanistan in March and sought asylum in Italy.

When he was abducted Thursday, Torsello was riding on a bus on a highway
between Lashkar-Gah and Kandahar. Mc Kiernan says that Torsello’s translator, who is Afghan and who was travelling with the photographer, says that five armed men stopped the bus and searched it. “Torsello was the only foreigner on the bus,” Mc Kiernan said, meaning the other riders were all Afghan. “They came on and took him. They claim to be Taliban, but the ‘official’ Taliban in Afghanistan claim to have nothing to do with this.”

The kidnappers have set a deadline of sunset Monday, October 23, the official end of the Islamic holiday Ramadan, for the exchange.

Based in London, Torsello has been in Afghanistan for more than a month covering the plight of Afghans in a war zone, with a special focus on medical issues. Torsello had been shooting pictures of the Emergency volunteer group for about a week before leaving for Kandahar, Mc Kiernan said.

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