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German abducted in Afghanistan wanted for fraud at home

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BERLIN, December 18 (RIA Novosti) - A German national abducted in Afghanistan on Monday is wanted by the German police for fraud, German news agencies said on Tuesday, quoting the missing man's lawyer.

Harold Kleber, a forty-two-year old recent convert to Islam married to a local Afghan woman, was reportedly stopped by a group of armed people while driving with his wife and her brother in the northwest of the country. He was then driven away against his will. Some reports suggest that his wife was also abducted.

Taliban insurgents, as well as criminal gangs, have kidnapped scores of foreigners in Afghanistan this year. The hard-line Islamic group, who ruled Afghanistan from 1996-2001, were accused of abducting two Germans near Kabul in July. One of the abductees was killed while the other was eventually freed three months later.

However, German TV reports said Kleber's Afghan wife had earlier divorced her cousin to marry the German national, and police sources suggest the abduction could have a "domestic" basis.

Television channels also reported that the Gruenhelme (Green Helmets) humanitarian organization had earlier accused Kleber, a carpenter by trade, of embezzling 87,300 euros allocated for a school building project in Afghanistan. Kleber took part in the construction of 26 schools in the war-stricken Central Asian country while working for Gruenhelme in 2003-2005.

According to a court case opened after a complaint by the humanitarian organization, Kleber could have invested the missing sum in the construction of a private house.

However, Kleber's lawyer said his client had only been involved in humanitarian construction projects in the Afghan province of Herat, and had earlier even been allowed by court authorities to leave Germany for several months to complete a project in Afghanistan.

A German court subsequently issued an arrest warrant for Kleber and put him on the country's wanted list after he had failed to return to Germany in due time.

In an interview with the German Neue Osnabruecker Zeitung newspaper, Afghan Trade and Industry Minister Amin Farhang described Kleber on Tuesday as "a good Muslim, a great aid worker and a friend of the Afghan people."

Afghan President Hamid Karzai has condemned the kidnapping, saying that, "Criminal acts like these are unacceptable to us," the German daily Bild said on Tuesday.

No official comment has yet been made by the German Foreign Ministry, except for a brief statement saying that they were trying to obtain reliable information on the situation.

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