Kidnapped American freed in Pakistan

ISLAMABAD — An American U.N. worker abducted more than two months ago turned up unharmed Saturday, lying alongside a road in western Pakistan with his hands and feet bound and pleading "Help me, help me," the man who found him said.

John Solecki was discovered Saturday evening abandoned in a village some 30 miles south of Quetta near the Afghan border after his captors called a local news agency to tell them where to look, officials said. At one point, the kidnappers had threatened to behead him.

Mohammed Anwar, the owner of a restaurant alongside the main Quetta-Karachi highway, told The Associated Press that he found a bound Solecki lying in the dirt near a wall. Anwar said he heard a voice in the gloom saying "Help me, help me" in English.

Solecki made no public comment. Police and U.N. officials declined to discuss what led to his release. U.N. officials who met with him reported that he was "tired but all right," U.N. spokeswoman Jennifer Pagonis said.

Pagonis would not say when Solecki, who headed the U.N. refugee agency's operations in Quetta, would leave Pakistan but said he would be reunited with his family "as soon as possible."

The release was a rare piece of good news amid intensifying violence here that has raised international alarm over the nuclear-armed country's stability. On Saturday, a suicide bomber attacked a paramilitary base in the capital, killing eight.

Solecki's abduction and the killing of his driver on Feb. 2 in Quetta raised concern that he was another victim in a spate of attacks on foreigners blamed on Islamist militants operating from strongholds along the Afghan frontier.

A previously unknown group, the Baluchistan Liberation United Front, had claimed responsibility for the abduction, threatening to behead him and issuing a grainy video on Feb. 13 of a blindfolded Solecki pleading for help.

But the group's name and demands indicated they were ethnic Baluch separatists who have been waging a long low-level insurgency in the impoverished but oil-rich southwest of Pakistan and have no record of taking or killing Western hostages.

The kidnappers had demanded the release of hundreds of people from alleged detention by Pakistani security agencies.

President Asif Ali Zardari last week announced that the government had "traced" 200 people previously listed as missing and provincial leaders insist they are no longer holding any political prisoners.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said he was grateful for the efforts to secure Solecki's release, citing Zardari and Afghan President Hamid Karzai. But Ban, who was in Paris, also pleaded for the release of another U.N. official, Robert Fowler, was still missing in Niger.