Aid workers tell of rescue

Four aid workers held in Afghanistan for more than three months under threat of execution told today of their prison ordeal and the special forces operation that snatched them to freedom.

Australians Peter Bunch and Diana Thomas and Americans Dayna Curry and Heather Mercer were among eight volunteers arrested by the Taliban in August on charges of trying to make converts to Christianity, punishable by death under the regime's hardline Islamic laws. They were flown out of Afghanistan yesterday.

Today, recovering at their countries' diplomatic missions in Islamabad, they revealed that as Kabul fell their captors planned to hold them hostage.

Ms Curry said: "These strange men with Kalashnikovs said, 'You have to come with us right now.' They put us in a van - we were sitting on rocket launchers - and we were driven down towards Kandahar. They said we needed to write a letter to our families and ask them for money. That was the only way we were going to get out."

At Ghazni, three hours south of Kabul, they were locked in a shipping container for a night and then taken to a prison in a nearby town. Their captors fled when Allied bombing began and they were released by Northern Alliance soldiers screaming "You are free! You are free! The city is free, the Taliban have left."

The four volunteers, accompanied by four German colleagues, were working for the Shelter Now charity, a Christian organisation based in Germany.

After their release the eight stayed with a local commander who organised their rescue. They waited at an airstrip for US special forces helicopters to pick them up, but the pilots could not locate them in the dark. Ms Mercer said: "We found some matches and set our headcoverings on fire."

Despite the aid workers' ordeal - which included squalid cells containing up to 40 women, mice and head lice - they want to go back. "Our hearts are in Afghanistan," Ms Mercer said.