KABUL, 4 June 2006 — Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai has sacked dozens of senior police officials days after anti-US riots in Kabul, an official said yesterday. The shake-up includes Kabul’s police chief, Gen. Jamil Junbish, whose forces failed to prevent rioters from rampaging through the city on Monday after a US military truck crashed into Afghan vehicles and killed at least five people.

He has been replaced by Gen. Amanullah Gozar, the commander for the highway where riots began and where the accident happened, an Interior Ministry official told Reuters on condition of anonymity. The worst anti-American unrest in Kabul since the fall of the Taleban in 2001 coincided with the bloodiest phase in a four and a half year insurgency raging in the country’s south and east.

About 34 police commanders have been sacked and nearly 50 others were shifted to other posts, a high-ranking interior ministry official said under condition of anonymity. The president’s office said the reshuffle was part of long-planned reform of the police service that had been launched before Monday’s riots.

“It was done under the Interior Ministry reform program which has been under way for months,” said Khaleeq Ahmad, one of the spokesmen for the president. But the official in the Interior Ministry, which handles police matters, said some of the changes were expedited after Monday’s riots and others were prompted by the violence.

Nearly 35 Taleban were killed in the latest strikes in Afghanistan as Afghan and coalition troops took back a district that had been in rebel hands for days, officials said.

Coalition planes also bombed an “enemy stronghold” in the south while an Afghan working for a Bangladeshi aid group was shot dead in the north and an influential tribal chief and top provincial health official were killed elsewhere.

Dozens of troops were dropped from coalition aircraft into a remote, mountainous district of Uruzgan province late Friday and recaptured the area, which had been overrun by Taleban nearly three days earlier, the defense ministry said.