By Paul Tait
KABUL (Reuters) - An international Christian aid group denied on Sunday Taliban accusations that eight of its foreign medical workers among 10 killed in Afghanistan's remote northeast had been proselytising.
The bodies of the medical aid workers were flown by helicopter from Badakshan province back to Kabul on Sunday, the U.S. Embassy in the Afghan capital said.
"Consular staff and FBI special agents assigned to the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, alongside Afghan counterparts and representatives from the UK and German Embassies, are now working to identify the victims of this tragic attack," the embassy said in a statement.
Although those killed have not been formally identified, aid group the International Assistance Mission (IAM) has said it appears the victims were from its 12-member eye care team that had been working in Badakshan and neighbouring Nuristan.
IAM has said the team consisted of six Americans, a German, a British woman and four Afghans. Five of the foreigners were men and three women.
On Saturday, the Taliban claimed responsibility for the killing, saying the medical workers had been carrying bibles in Dari -- one of Afghanistan's two main languages -- and were killed because they were proselytising.
"The accusation is completely baseless, they were not carrying any bibles except maybe their personal bibles," Dirk Frans, the executive director of IAM, told Reuters.
"As an organisation we are not involved in proselytising at all," he said.
Despite the Taliban claim, there was no independent confirmation of any role by the Islamist group.
The IAM said the members of its eye care team were on their way back to Kabul when they were killed by unidentified gunmen.
"NO ONE EVER EXPECTS"
One of those killed was British surgeon Karen Woo, who worked with a separate group called Bridge Afghanistan and was well known in the foreign aid community in Afghanistan.
She wrote in a recent blog posting that she would act as the team doctor and run a mother-and-child clinic in Nuristan.
"Perhaps no one ever expects it to be them, perhaps not their immediate friends either, it (is) always some poor unknown person, a local national, a third country national. We count those that matter to us," Woo wrote in another recent blog about the dangers of working in Afghanistan (link.reuters.com/puc83n).
The IAM describes itself as an "international charitable, non-profit, Christian organisation" which has been helping Afghans with health and economic development since 1966.
Frans said the group would review its security procedures after the incident but thought it was "highly unlikely" they would leave Afghanistan.
"We have been here when the king was in power, when the Russians were in power, when the mujahideen were fighting here in Kabul under the Taliban and all the time we have stayed," Frans said.
Afghan police told Reuters the bodies had been found early on Saturday and that the group had been warned not camp near dense forest in Nuristan.
Nuristan is a remote region with a growing insurgent presence as well as smugglers and bandits. U.S. forces withdrew from the province in the past year after taking heavy losses in years of battle near its Pakistan border.
Violence in Afghanistan is at its worst since U.S.-led and Afghan armed groups overthrew the Taliban in 2001.
June was the bloodiest month of the war for foreign forces in Afghanistan, with more than 100 killed. Hundreds of Afghan civilians have also been killed this year as they become caught up in the crossfire.
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