A militant group claiming responsibility for kidnapping three foreign U.N. workers said Saturday it will execute them unless Britain withdraws its troops from Afghanistan and two other governments stop supporting U.S. policy here. A spokesman for Jaish-al Muslimeen, a splinter group of the Taliban, told The Associated Press it had made a video of the three hostages _ but provided no evidence that it was holding the trio. Unidentified armed men kidnapped Filipino diplomat Angelito Nayan, Kosovan Shqipe Habibi and Annetta Flanigan from Northern Ireland in downtown Kabul on Thursday. All were helping organize Afghanistan's historic election. "If these countries don't agree to our demands, we will do the same thing as the mujahedeen are doing in Iraq," Ishaq Manzoor, a purported spokesman for Jaish-al Muslimeen, or Army of Muslims, said by satellite telephone. Manzoor, who said he was speaking from near the Afghan-Pakistan border, close to the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad, also demanded the release of all Afghan detainees from the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and that the search for the abductees be called off. "We may kill them if we could not get a positive response," he said. He said the video would be released "in two or three days" to an Arab television channel.
