AFP
Masked gunmen have abducted 30 Shia Muslim men who were travelling by bus through southern Afghanistan, officials said on Tuesday.
The men, members of the minority Hazara ethnic group, were seized on Monday evening in Zabul province, on the road between the western city of Herat and the capital Kabul.
Hazara Shia Muslims are often the target of sectarian violence at the hands of Sunni Muslim extremists in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
"Our driver saw a group of masked men in Afghan army uniform signalling him and he thought they were soldiers so he stopped," Nasir Ahmad, an official with the Ghazni Paima bus company, told AFP.
"The gunmen took 30 Hazaras away with them."
Ahmad said the kidnappers took only the men on the two buses and not the women and children travelling with them.
No one immediately claimed responsibility for the abduction, but kidnappings for ransom by bandits, local militias and Taliban insurgents are common in Afghanistan.
Interior ministry spokesman Sediq Sediqqi said police were "doing everything to ensure their safe release".
Nearly 200 Hazara Shias were killed in early 2013 in two major attacks in the Pakistani city of Quetta, capital of Baluchistan province which borders southern Afghanistan.
US-led NATO forces ended their combat mission in Afghanistan in late December after more than a decade fighting the Taliban, having failed fully to quell their insurgency.
Civilian casualties rose sharply last year as local forces took on the task of battling the militants, with 22 percent more killed or wounded in conflict than in 2013.
There have been fears recently that the influence of the Islamic State (IS) group, which has a strongly anti-Shia agenda, could be growing in Afghanistan.
