Foreign soldier missing in Afghanistan "from UAE"

KABUL, June 14 (Reuters) A member of Afghanistan's US-led coalition force who has gone missing is a United Arab Emirates national, a coalition official said today.

The official, who declined to be identified, gave no further details about the male soldier who the Taliban say they kidnapped in the southern province of Helmand yesterday.

A UAE government official said yesterday a member of a team providing security for a UAE aid mission in Afghanistan had gone missing.

The UAE has been providing aid -- including setting up a field hospital, schools and mosques -- under an agreement with Afghanistan's government since 2003.

A Taliban spokesman, Qari Mohammad Yousuf, said the Taliban had kidnapped the soldier and he was in good health. The soldier's fate would be decided by a Taliban leadership council.

''His health is fine,'' Yousuf said by telephone from an undisclosed location.

If confirmed, it would be the first kidnapping of a coalition soldier by the Taliban, whose hardline Kabul government was overthrown in 2001.

Helmand, long a Taliban stronghold, is the main opium poppy-growing region of Afghanistan, the world's biggest heroin producer. The Taliban have kidnapped several Westerners and Afghans in recent months from Helmand and an adjacent province.

The group freed an Italian journalist, whom it had kidnapped in March, after the Afghan government released five Taliban members in a widely criticised deal. The Taliban beheaded the journalist's interpreter and his driver.

The Taliban later freed two French aid workers, although it was not clear if any ransom had been paid.

The UAE was one of only three countries to recognise the Taliban government after they captured Kabul in 1996.

REUTERS SG RK1355