New Delhi/Kabul: Around 150 Indian citizens, picked up by the Taliban on Saturday, have been released and are now inside Kabul airport. They are being processed for evacuation and will be airlifted out of Afghanistan soon, the government sources said.
Earlier, Afghan local media had claimed that a group of 150 people, mostly Indians, were abducted by men affiliated with the Taliban from an area close to Hamid Karzai International Airport on Saturday morning.
However, Ahmadullah Waseq, a Taliban spokesman, soon denied the allegations of the abduction in an interview with the daily Al-Information. He said members of the group were present around the airport and would not allow people to enter the airport.
Later, the government sources confirmed that the Indians were being questioned at a nearby police station and the back-channel talks were on to secure their release.
According to Kabul Now, a local media in Afghanistan, the abductees include some Afghan citizens and Afghan Sikhs as well, but most of them are Indian citizens.
According to the report, the people were "all boarded on eight minivan vehicles around 01:00 am, Saturday morning, heading to the Kabul airport for evacuation but they couldn't enter the airport for lack of cooperation."
The Kabul Now report said that the people were "taken to Tarakhil, an eastern neighbourhood in the capital Kabul, after beating them physically."
The reported abduction comes hours after an Indian Air Force C-130J transport aircraft managed to evacuate around 85 Indians from Kabul; the plane has landed safely in Tajikistan, sources said, adding that a second (larger C-17) aircraft is on standby in India for further evacuations.
The government is trying to bring as many Indians as possible into the airport at Kabul to keep them safe while it works out the evacuation logistics.
India has evacuated all embassy staff but an estimated 1,000 citizens remain in several cities in the war-torn country, and ascertaining their location and condition is proving to be a challenge, a Home Ministry official had said, since not all of them registered themselves with the embassy.
Among those are around 200 Sikhs and Hindus who have taken refuge at a gurudwara in Kabul.
(With PTI inputs)