BAGRAM AIR BASE, Afghanistan, 8 May 2003 —American troops in southeast Afghanistan have seized two people suspected of links to renegade warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who is on a US list of wanted terrorists, a US military spokesman said yesterday.

A Special Forces patrol near Gardez, 100 kilometers south of Kabul, on Tuesday “took two people under control believed to be associated with the Hizb-e-Islami Gulbuddin Hekmatyar group,” US Air Force Lt. Col. Douglas Lefforge told reporters.

The same patrol also found land mine booby traps near Gardez, capital of Paktia province which borders Pakistan, but Lefforge said the two detainees were not connected with them.

Lefforge said the two were identified as being associated with Hekmatyar from photographs or documents relating to his extremist group. He was unable to say whether they were important captives.

Former Afghan Prime Minister Hekmatyar is allegedly attempting to destabilise the government of President Hamid Karzai.

Several attacks on foreign and government targets have been blamed on his extremists, or Taleban and Al-Qaeda remnants.

The peacekeeping International Security Assistance Force blamed Hekmatyar for a rocket attack on its Kabul headquarters on March 30. No one was injured but two cars were written off in the nighttime attack.

In adjacent Paktia province, US Special Forces from Urgon-e base discovered a cache of 80 anti-tank and anti-personnel mines near the town of Shaykhan.

In central Uruzgan province an 82nd Airborne soldier suffered minor chest injuries when an explosive device went off near his vehicle at Deh Rawud. He was treated and returned to duty.

A US-led coalition of more than 10,000 troo ps is currently hunting down Taleban and Al-Qaeda remnants in the south and east of the country.

In another development, security forces in Tajikistan arrested 10 drug traffickers disguised as shepherds on the Afghan border and seized 16 kilograms of heroin as well as five Kalashnikov automatic weapons, Russian border guards said yesterday.

The capture late Tuesday came just two days after a similar operation netted 200 kilograms of heroin, bringing the total haul of drugs seized on the Tajik-Afghan border since the start of the year to more than three tons, including 2.5 tons of heroin. This is more than four times the amount seized in the same period last year.

Separately, a Tajik court sentenced two Russian border guards to 18 months in prison for concealing 19 kilograms of heroin while they were on duty at the border. The men were also charged with complicity with a group of drugs traffickers, legal sources said. The former Soviet republic of Tajikistan, with a 1,340-kilometer common border with Afghanistan, has become a transit zone for drugs destined for the West. Some 11,000 Russian border guards are helping to guard the frontier.

Meanwhile, Romania’s Parliament voted yesterday to send 25 officers and non-commissioned officers to Afghanistan on a yearlong mission to help reorganize the war-torn country’s army, a spokesman for the Defense Ministry said in Bucharest. Last year, Romania sent 530 troops to Afghanistan, including a contingent within the ISAF.