Armed religious police of the purist Islamic Taleban yesterday arrested the EU Commissioner for Fisheries, Consumer Policy and Humanitarian Aid, Ms Emma Bonino, and 18 others for 3 1/2 hours before releasing them and apologising.
Ms Bonino later said she had been frightened by the experience. "I was scared because they were fully armed and had Kalashnikovs (assault rifles) pointed at us," she told reporters after her release.
Ms Bonino was arrested on a visit to a women's hospital in Kabul. The Taleban accused journalists with her of taking photographs of women, an offence under Taleban regulations.
She said the experience had given her a taste of what Afghans go through every day. "This is an example of what people here go through every day: in a situation of random terror."
Ms Bonino's spokesman said the journalists accompanying Ms Bonino were unaware of the restrictions on filming and stopped as soon as they were asked.
"(Bonino) went upstairs to talk to the director (of the clinic); meanwhile, the press had entered the wards - no one had told them not to. They had been filming for two minutes and when they were told to stop they packed up," said the spokesman, Mr Filippo di Robilant.
He said one aid worker had been hit with the butt of a Kalashnikov by the religious police.
All 19 of those arrested were released after the television crews accompanying Ms Bonino agreed to hand over a number of video cassettes.
An EU delegate also wrote a letter on Ms Bonino's behalf to the Taleban authorities, expressing "regret at the events" that led to the detentions.
The Taleban have banned pictures of all living beings, saying they are unIslamic. When they captured Kabul last September, they tore tape from video and music cassettes and used it to festoon checkpoints.
Ms Bonino's group was detained in the hot, dusty yard of a police station in central Kabul, guarded by turbanned Taleban fighters armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles.
Their release apparently came after the authorities consulted Mullah Mohammed Rabbani, acting head of the Taleban's interim ruling council in Kabul.
After her release, Ms Bonino met the Taleban's deputy minister of foreign affairs, Mr Sher Abbas Stanakzai. Ms Bonino said Mr Stanakzai had apologised.
Ms Bonino said she did not intend to cut aid funding for emergency programmes in Afghanistan following her ordeal. She said the aid agencies funded by the European Community Humanitarian Office, which falls under her portfolio, had asked her to continue.
"Our partners have asked us to continue. The only possible threat is the threat of withdrawal (of funding), and that is a threat to the people," she said.
Ms Bonino has been a harsh critic of the Taleban's record on women, and her experience at their hands had not mellowed her yesterday.
The Taleban have closed girls' schools, banned women from the workplace and forbidden them from leaving their houses without wearing the burqa, a traditional Afghan veil that covers the wearer from head to toe, leaving only a small patch of gauze to see out of.
"Wearing one of these burqas is to make a human being a shadow. It is the most effective way to take out identity," she said.
Ms Bonino said she had brought up the subject of women with Mr Stanakzai. "He said that these questions would be decided when they had brought peace and security to the country."
She added that the West, which, she said, was not an uninvolved bystander in the Afghan conflict, would bring political pressure to bear on the Taleban.
Ms Bonino left Kabul for Pakistan shortly after her release.