Kabul  - It was around 6 pm when hospital director Muhammed Hashim Wahaaj left his office in downtown Kabul to go home.

A car followed his vehicle. Wahaaj stopped to let the car pass.

As the car pulled up, a shot rang out, and the bullet hit the 47-year-old in his upper arm.

Three or four men, Wahaaj said, emerged from the car, blindfolded him and tied him up, forced him into the vehicle and had him crouch on the floor.

This event began a painful ordeal of torture and a fear of death for the doctor.

Hanoi  - Police will bring attempted murder charges against a man who shot two Ho Chi Minh City jewelry shop employees and posed as a police officer while trying to steal 480 ounces of gold, a police official said Monday.

Mai Van Tan, director of Ho Chi Minh City's Department of Social Order Crime Investigations, said would-be thief Huynh Huu Nhan would also be prosecuted for robbery and for illegal possession and use of military weapons.

Nhan shot the two jewelry-shop employees Saturday, trying to pull off a heist that took months of preparation.

Bangkok  - Thai police on Monday arrested a 64-year-old German man on charges of setting fire to 11 public phone booths after allegedly losing all his money to Thai bar girls.

Heinz-Dieter Beckers, 64, confessed to the charges of setting fire to the phone booths and at least three billboards at public bus stops, Police Lieutenant Colonel Noppasin Poonsawat said.

Beckers, a frequent visitor to Thailand who had overstayed his tourist visa, told police that bar girls at Pattaya beach resort had taken all his money and he had recently lost his ATM card when a cash machine failed to eject it, leaving him penniless.

Hanoi  - The captain of a South Korean freighter anchored off the Vietnamese coast killed his chief mechanic in a fight before committing suicide, news reports said Monday.

Sailors told the Vietnamese Coast Guard that the ship's captain Hong Dong Kwon, 45, had killed mechanic Heo Seong Kyu, 45, during a fight with several sailors. After Heo died, the sailors confined Hong in his own cabin.

Tokyo - Japan's top opposition leader was facing increasing pressure to step down after his secretary was arrested for allegedly taking illegal corporate donations, Japanese media reported Monday.

Ichiro Ozawa, president of the Democratic Party, rebuffed mounting calls for his resignation within his own party even after Takanori Okubo, also an accountant for Ozawa's political group Rikuzankai, was arrested last week.

Japan's two largest newspapers said more than half the people surveyed wanted Ozawa to step down as the opposition leader.

Berlin  - Germany plans to ask Kenya to take custody of nine pirates captured earlier this week by the German Navy off the coast of Somalia, a Foreign Ministry spokesman said Sunday.

Prosecutors in the German city of Hamburg issued arrest warrants for the nine Somalis on Friday, but a day later said there was no need for them to be transferred to Germany.

The Foreign Ministry spokesman said the request for Kenya to take custody of the pirates would formally be made to authorities in Nairobi by the German embassy on Monday.

Germany's government had been seeking the transfer of the suspects to Kenya, a move that was sealed Friday morning in an agreement with the European Union.