KABUL, 4 December 2005 — A remote-controlled bomb and a separate ambush, both claimed by Taleban militants, killed a district chief and three policemen in southern Afghanistan, officials said yesterday.
The bomb was detonated Friday under the vehicle of the head of Shawali Kot district of insurgency-hit southern Kandahar province, deputy head Obaidullah Khan said.
The official, Ayatullah Popal, and two of his bodyguards were killed. Three policemen were wounded, Khan said. “The bomb was set off by Taleban,” he said, adding an investigation was under way to find those responsible.
Also on Friday, Taleban fighters ambushed a routine police patrol in neighboring Helmand province, provincial police chief Abdul Rahman Jan said.
At least one was killed and five others wounded in the attack in Nawzad district, he said, blaming it on loyalists of the hard-line Taleban regime that was removed from power in November 2001.
Helmand, the country’s top opium-producing area, has seen some of the bloodiest attacks on Afghanistan’s police force. Eighteen were killed in an ambush on Oct. 10 that officials said could have been carried out by Taleban fighters or people involved in the drugs trade.
A man who said he was a spokesman for the Taleban claimed responsibility for both of Friday’s incidents. “We carried out the attacks in Nawzad and Shawali Kot district,” the man, who identified himself as Yousuf Ahmadi, told AFP by telephone from an unknown location.
Four years after the Taleban regime was ousted in a US-led offensive, fighters loyal to the movement still regularly attack government and foreign troops and other targets with links to the US-backed government. The unrest has escalated this year despite the presence of a nearly 20,000-strong coalition force under US command and a separate NATO-led peacekeeping force of about 10,000 troops.
About 1,500 people — many of the militants — have been killed, the most in a year since the Taleban was ousted because it did not hand over Osama Bin Laden for the Sept. 11 suicide attacks.
