In the Qarabagh district of Ghazni, a local bus, chartered by a party of 23 Korean Christians, was stopped en route between Kabul and Kandahar on Thursday 19 July. The passengers were abducted.
The section of road, in central Afghanistan, on which they were kidnapped is just a two-hour drive from Kabul.
Intense negotiations to secure their release have been taking place since then.
Meanwhile, in response to the hostage crisis, South Korea has added Afghanistan to a list of countries to which its citizens are banned from travelling.
Any South Korean making an unauthorised journey to a banned country can be jailed for up to one year or fined 3 million won (about £1,575).
The South Korean Foreign Ministry has also urged any of its expatriates in Afghanistan -- believed to number about 200 -- to leave the country.
The Saemmul Presbyterian Church, which sent the group, complied immediately with the request.
It had another 42 workers in Afghanistan, doing volunteer work in Kabul and Kandahar, at the time of the kidnapping.
Two of the male hostages were subsequently killed.
The second hostage killed by the Taleban in central Afghanistan was identified as 29-year-old Shim Sung-min, a former IT worker.
His body was found at the side of the road in Ghazni Province. He had been shot.
The group's leader, Pastor Bae Hyung-kyu, 42, was the first to be shot dead by the militants.
A man claiming to speak on behalf of the Taleban said the militants had killed the Korean hostages because the Afghan government had refused its demands to release eight jailed militants.
The kidnapping and murders raised questions in South Korea about what the team was doing in such a dangerous place.
South Korean media have been quick to call for future trips to be more carefully planned and even to question the merits of such missions in the first place.
The Saemmul Church insists the hostages were on an aid, not an evangelistic, mission, providing medical services to people suffering from disease.
"We have to be careful in sending our people to dangerous countries," a director of a Christian newspaper supported by the Saemmul Church, said. "But as Christians we also have a duty to go and help others who are in need -- not to evangelise, but to help."
South Korea had already planned to withdraw the 200 peacekeeping troops it has in Afghanistan by the end of 2007.
However, apart from the soft diplomacy being exercised on the hostages' behalf, an amount of political brinkmanship is also being practised and rival ideologies expounded by the American and Afghan governments on the one hand and the Taleban on the other.
The killings raised the stakes, piling pressure on Afghan President Hamid Karzai to save the remaining captives.
But Mr Karzai refused to swap prisoners for hostages after he was criticised for releasing five Taleban members from jail in March in exchange for an Italian reporter.
The negotiations rumbled slowly on and the government vowed not to bow to demands for a prisoner exchange.
Moreover, on Monday 6 August, a US presidential spokesman reportedly said there would be no "quid pro quo" over the captives -- 18 of them women -- who were seized.
A delegation of tribal elders, mullahs and members of parliament negotiated with the Taleban to help to secure the hostages' release.
The seizure was the largest-scale abduction of foreigners since the fall of the Taleban regime in 2001.
The Taleban said the two women were released because they were sick and as a goodwill gesture.
They said that they wanted Taleban imprisoned by the Afghan government to be set free if the other Koreans, most of whom are women, were to be released.
A contact in Afghanistan, shared an Afghan view of the kidnapping:
"This morning we heard that the Korean hostages were in the custody of the Afghan Taliban just in the first few days after their bus was stopped by armed Taliban on the main road in Ghazni, which is used by thousands of vehicles every day and controlled both by Taliban and the Afghan police.
"(Why this Korean bus was stopped and who reported it to the Taliban is still an open question?)
"After a few days, they (the hostages) were handed over to the ISI and Pakistani Taliban, said the Governor of Ghazni Province, who intimated that that is why this process of negotiations has been so protracted.
"Religious leaders here say that taking women as hostages is an insult to Islam and Afghan culture.
"This sort of thing has never been a part of Afghan culture and respect shown to women and elders has even been known to solve longstanding enmities and hostilities between Afghan families.
"Women could hit or slap a man from a rival or enemy group but men were not permitted to retaliate against women.
"Only women of the attacked party had the right to return the same treatment to the female aggressors, so this treatment of women is something non-Afghan, non-Islamic and a new thing in Afghanistan.
"Although occasional kidnapping has been known to occur at the hands of smugglers and drug traffickers at the border, not under the control of the Afghanistan government, the freeing of such hostages was negotiable and there was no threat to the life of any hostage in such incidents.
"Forced marriage, rape, kidnapping and taking people as hostages are all products of the three-decade-long war that has devastated the lives of innocent Afghan civilians as well as others.
"During this war, people were trained in the taking of hostages, destruction of public places, sabotage, explosions and all kinds of subversion. It is to this root that the present situation can be traced."
At about the same time, a contact in Asia, shared some insights into the Korean point of view of the situation: Click here
To read other Korean reactions to news of the hostage-taking, click here.
Phil Simpson, Regional Director for Eurasia, comments, "Afghanistan is a really tough context to be in at the moment.
"I really hope and pray that the Korean hostages will be kept safe and released as soon as possible -- as the SNI workers were a few years back when they were taken hostage in Afghanistan.
"The Korean Church has so much to offer in terms of releasing humanitarian workers for tough situations like Afghanistan.
"I pray that their government will not impose restrictions or sanctions on those who chose to serve God and humanity in this way.
"Afghanistan needs all the help it can get at the moment in terms of nation building. I sometimes wonder who are the real hostages here -- whether it's not just the Koreans but also the Afghan people themselves."
If you have the software to view some YouTube links, you might like to check out the following clips from the Saemmul Church:
Click here
Click here