• English Site
• > World
• > Afghanistan

German Hostage Crisis

Betrayal in Kabul

By Matthias Gebauer and Holger Stark

The German engineer who was kidnapped in Afghanistan, Rudolf Blechschmidt, has been released, but at a high price: The crisis team was forced to pay ransom money to murderers and release prisoners in exchange.

On a Wednesday afternoon more than two weeks ago, Rudolf Blechschmidt thought he was about to die. Painstaking efforts to secure his release had just failed. One of his kidnappers faced him with a Kalashnikov rifle. Instead of the suitcase of money they had demanded, the kidnappers, hiding in the mountains of Afghanistan's Wardak province, received a message that must have shocked them: Afghan intelligence had torpedoed the deal the German crisis team had agreed with the kidnappers and had arrested the kidnappers' two messengers in Kabul.

The Pashtun standing in front of Blechschmidt was beside himself with rage. He loaded his assault rifle and pointed it at the German hostage.

Rudolf Blechschmidt, 62, owes his life to an Afghan doctor the kidnappers had summoned to their mountain hideout to examine their ailing hostage. Blechschmidt suffers from a heart condition and takes beta-blockers regularly. The 150 kilometers (93 miles) the group had traveled on foot since the abduction on July 18 had only made matters worse.

The doctor placed himself between the kidnapper and Blechschmidt, lifted his arms and asked the man to lower his rifle. After hesitating for a moment, the kidnapper complied, sparing the German engineer's life.

Blechschmidt was released in the middle of last week, but his freedom came at a high price. A German crisis team has agreed to a hostage exchange deal for the first time since 1975, when the "2nd of June Movement," a left-wing terrorist group, managed to secure the freedom of seven imprisoned activists in exchange for the then-chairman of Germany's Christian Democratic Union (CDU), Peter Lorenz. Blechschmidt and five of his Afghan employees who had also been kidnapped were released in exchange for five of the gang's accomplices, plus several hundred thousand dollars in ransom.

A convoy accompanying the liberated engineer arrived at the German embassy in Kabul at about 7 p.m. local time last Wednesday. A German military doctor hooked Blechschmidt up to an IV to treat him for dehydration. By evening, Blechschmidt was eating pasta with German Ambassador Hans-Ulrich Seidt, and the next day he flew home to Germany.

A Success and a Setback

The release marks the end of an almost three-month ordeal for Blechschmidt, a civil engineer, but for the German government it represents both a success and a setback. The crisis team was able to save a German citizen's life; but by paying for it in money and prisoners it undermined the policy German Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) frequently cites as a political mantra: "The German government will not let itself be blackmailed." Indeed, the word has surely gotten around, among other would-be kidnappers in Afghanistan, that Berlin does in fact let itself be blackmailed, at least in extreme situations.

The hostage crisis in Afghanistan has also dashed the German government's hopes that its crisis management team could this time act as mediator rather than as an ATM for kidnappers -- with an unlimited line of credit.

Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble (CDU) and his deputy secretary, August Hanning, after agreeing to pay a ransom running into the millions to the men who had kidnapped Leipzig engineers Thomas Nitschke and René Bräunlich in Iraq, argued that the German government should no longer give in to the monetary demands of criminals, especially those who "can be expected to commit other serious crimes," as former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt once said in response to the Lorenz kidnapping. This time around, Berlin hoped that its negotiators could keep the ransom amount small enough so that perhaps the families of the hostages could secure their release.

Of course, the reality in Afghanistan was different. When another hostage, Rüdiger Dietrich, broke down and fell to the ground during a forced march into the mountains on July 20, the kidnappers sprayed him with bullets from their Kalashnikovs. As of that day both Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier and his crisis team were no longer dealing just with kidnappers, but with murderers. Now that Blechschmidt is free, German prosecutors are seeking to charge the kidnappers with Dietrich's murder.

But last week was about saving Blechschmidt's life. On Monday the kidnappers' leader, a man called Nissam Udin, had threatened to sell Blechschmidt to the Taliban in Helmand, a southern province where the Kabul government has lost all authority. Being handed over the Taliban could well have meant death for Blechschmidt.

The members of the crisis team knew that the kidnappers were beginning to see the German engineer as a burden. Their confidence in the German negotiators also plunged after the Afghan intelligence agency, NDS, intervened on a Wednesday three weeks earlier. It was on that day that "Mullah Nissam," as Udin is called, had sent two of his closest confidantes to Kabul -- his right-hand man Hassan Gul and a medical student from Kabul named Abdul Wali, who they called the "Doctor" and supposedly had close contacts with the Taliban.

The deal already in place consisted of two parts: Money would be paid to the messengers behind the high walls of the German embassy in Kabul, and a short time later Blechschmidt would be handed over to Red Cross officials in the mountains of Wardak. But the NDS decided to take matters into its own hands. A few weeks earlier it had arrested Nissam's father -- a typical Afghan approach to applying pressure to kidnappers. Then, on the Wednesday of the arranged transfer, NDS agents arrested Gul and the "Doctor" just as they were entering the embassy gates. When an accomplice told them about the NDS ambush in Kabul, the kidnappers dragged Blechschmidt from the Red Cross vehicle and roared off into the mountains again. The handover had failed. In a telephone conversation with his son Markus, 32, Blechschmidt later called the incident a "betrayal."