When foreigners are kidnapped in Afghanistan it always makes headlines, but it rarely rates a mention when Afghans are abducted in their own country as worsening security and poverty fuel crime.
Rather than being seized by Taliban insurgents bent on pressuring foreign armies and aid workers for political ends, Afghans are more often kidnapped for ransom by criminal gangs.
Many of the victims are from families of Afghanistan's fledgling business class and the kidnappings are driving abroad the few investors willing to put money into the struggling Afghan economy which relies on foreign aid to fund 90 percent of expenditure.
Sayed Mustafa, a businessman importing fuel in the Afghan capital, received a call from his family two months ago saying his 10-year-old son had not returned home from school.
Frantically, he scoured the streets and hospitals but by night-time there was still no sign of the boy.
Then he received a phone call.
"'Don't try to inform the police or we will kill your son'," Mustafa said the caller told him. "'Listen carefully, the price of your son is $200,000. Give us the money and we'll free him'."
"I didn't believe him until I heard my son crying and calling out 'where are you father?'," he said.
"I didn't get another call from the kidnappers for two days. On the third day they called and asked if I had the money ready.
"I wanted to negotiate, to bring down the price," Mustafa said, fighting back tears. "But I didn't know it would cost my son's life ... They killed my son because I hesitated to pay."
Security is deteriorating as Afghan and foreign forces fail to bring the Taliban insurgency under control. Rising food prices only add to poverty in a country which is already one of the poorest in the world. Life expectancy is only around 44 years.
"The security situation is worsening day-by-day. The government is still in a deep sleep. There are no jobs, no good income, so it is obvious that kidnappings will increase," said Jawed Rashidi, a doctor in Kabul.
Some 130 people have been reported kidnapped in the last five months, the Afghan Criminal Investigation Department (CID) says, but the real number is believed to be far higher.
"We have about 130 cases of abduction registered, about 100 people are still with the kidnappers, and more than 100 individuals involved in abduction have been detained," said CID chief Mirza Mohammad Yaarmand.
Five kidnap victims have been killed.
Of those kidnapped since March, only 13 have been foreigners, most of them either Western aid workers, or businessmen and construction engineers from Turkey, Iran, India and Nepal.
"The cases are either political or financial. The kidnappers disguise themselves as minister's guards, as U.N. guards, as foreign troops or Afghan army or police," Yaarmand said, according to Reuters.