KABUL (Reuters) - The ruling Taliban on Sunday shut down an international aid agency operating in Afghanistan and arrested 24 of its international and local staff, accusing the group of trying to convert Muslims to Christianity.
A senior Taliban official, quoted by the official Voice of Shariat radio, said the eight foreign staffers of Shelter Now International had "confessed to the crime" and asked for pardon.
Earlier, the official news agency Bakhtar said authorities had found Bibles in a house of the agency's Afghan staff.
Among eight foreigners arrested, six were women and two men while the rest 16 were Afghans, it said. The nationalities of the foreigners were not given.
A U.N. source in Islamabad, capital of neighbouring Pakistan, said Shelter Now was an international non-governmental organisation supported by various Western countries and engaged in humanitarian work.
Taliban radio said the agency's foreign staffers were arrested while trying to convert members of an Afghan Muslim family by showing them material about Christianity through a computer.
It quoted the deputy of the Taliban religious police, Salim Haqqani, as saying the staff had "confessed their crime without any compulsion, regretted their act and asked for pardon...".
Earlier, Bakhtar said Taliban security officials found two Shelter Now computers and two computer discs containing material on Christianity.
The Taliban, a purist Islamic movement, issued an edict last year prescribing the death penalty for any Muslim converting to any other religion or those involved in such conversions.
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The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
—Edmund Burke