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GHAZNI, Afghanistan : The fate of 22 South Koreans held by Afghanistan's extremist Taliban militia hung in the balance on Monday after a rebel deadline passed without the hostages being killed.
The insurgent group said it had extended the noon deadline by four hours at the request of government negotiators who asked for more time to end an impasse apparently centred on the rebels' demands for Taliban prisoners to be freed.
"If by four o'clock today (1130 GMT) our demands were not met, the leading council of the Taliban will reconsider its decision," spokesman Yousuf Ahmadi told AFP, adding he referred to "the deadline and the fate of the hostages."
Then, "we will see," he said.
The hardline rebel group said on Sunday it would start killing the 22 Christians abducted July 19 unless the government agreed to release the prisoners, a demand negotiators have rejected.
They shot dead the leader of the group, a 42-year-old pastor, last week. His bullet-riddled body returned home on Monday but his family said it would not hold a funeral until the other captives were freed.
Ahmadi said on Monday his group stood firm in its decision to begin killing hostages. "We have become tired of all this, the government is deceiving us," he said.
Negotiators said the Taliban, who have set four other deadlines for the South Koreans, were inflexible. "The negotiations are stuck," one of the leading members of the negotiating team, Mahmood Gailani, told AFP.
"We are ready to negotiate. It's up to the Taliban," he said.
Asked about the hostages, he said: "The Taliban said that they are well kept and alive."
Another member of the team, Waheedullah Mujadadi, said officials had asked for 48 hours "to be able to pave the ground for an acceptable solution."
The rebels had also refused a government demand to release the 16 female captives on the grounds that it was against Islamic and Afghan custom to take women as prisoners and hostages, Gailani said.
An Afghan official told AFP on condition of anonymity on Monday that the government could resort to military action should talks fail.
The Christians, said to be mostly in their 20s and 30s, were kidnapped July 19 while travelling through the risky Ghazni province by bus. They were on an aid mission to devoutly Islamic Afghanistan.
The Taliban has said they were separated into smaller groups and most of them were ill.
One said in a telephone interview with Seoul's JoongAng Ilbo newspaper published on Monday that she was with a group of three others who were "OK at the moment" but did not know how the other captives were faring.
"We move sometimes once a day and sometimes every two or three days," the woman, identified as 34-year-old Lee Ji-Young, said. She consulted one of her captors while giving the interview, the paper said.
Several foreigners have been seized this year by militants waging a deadly insurgency against the Western-backed government that replaced the Taliban regime driven from power in late 2001 for sheltering Al-Qaeda.
Most of have been freed, some reportedly after hefty ransom payments, although in the case of an Italian hostage, a journalist, two Afghans were beheaded.
The militants are also holding a German engineer, kidnapped in Wardak province near Kabul a day before the South Koreans, and have also demanded the release of prisoners to save his life.
He was captured with a German colleague who died four days later. The Taliban said they shot him, but authorities said he died from the conditions of his detention. Four Afghans captured with the engineers are also being held. - AFP/de
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