Afghan President Hamid Karzai has issued a decree ordering death penalty for criminals who remove body parts from kidnapped children, the attorney general said yesterday.

The decree comes amid heightened worries over kidnapping of children after Interior Minister Ali Ahmad Jalali said that several hundred had been abducted in recent years and body parts of some of them removed for sale abroad.

Attorney General Mahmoud Daqiq told the maximum punishment for trafficking or kidnapping children used to be 15 years in prison. ?Now the decree proposes the death sentence for someone who removes an organ of a kidnapped child or kills a child after kidnapping.? He said the maximum term for kidnapping a child had been increased to 20 years in prison.

Authorities say kidnappers are the first link in an international chain of organised crime that sees Afghan children sold as servants, for sexual abuse, or for their organs that are sold for huge profits abroad.

Daqiq said authorities were investigating 47 cases of child kidnapping and trafficking in Kabul alone. In some cases, residents say authorities have taken bribes to free kidnappers after arresting them.

A child rescued from kidnappers told last month in the southern city of Kandahar that he had seen the bodies of four boys of about his age that had been cut open and had their organs removed.

Officials said the kidnappers took the organs for sale in Pakistan.