Eight foreign aid workers plucked from Afghanistan in a dramatic midnight rescue were forced to make a bonfire of their Afghan "burqa" robes to guide in US Special Forces helicopters, one of them said Thursday. The two Americans, two Australians and four Germans, employees of the German charity Shelter Now International, were picked up by three helicopters overnight Wednesday from a field south of the Afghan capital, Kabul, ending a more than three-month ordeal in Taliban custody.
The German leader of the group, Georg Taubmann, told reporters that they had been rescued just in time, with rogue Taliban forces believed to have been closing in as they huddled in the field outside the town of Ghazni.
We had lamps, but when we heard the helicopters overhead we realised they couldn't see us," said Taubmann, who was speaking in German.
"So we made a fire or our clothes, including the burqas the women were wearing."
A burqa is the all-enveloping head-to-toe garment Afghan women were forced to wear in public under Taliban rule.
The aid workers -- two men and six women -- were flown to a military air base near Islamabad on Thursday morning.
They had been arrested in Kabul, along with 16 Afghan colleagues in early August and charged with trying to convert Afghan Muslims to Christianity.
Under the Taliban's hardline brand of Islamic law, all eight could have faced the death penalty if convicted.