KANDAHAR, Afghanistan, 15 December 2005 — Unidentified gunmen riding motorcycles yesterday shot dead a well-known pro-government Islamic cleric in Afghanistan’s volatile southern city of Kandahar, police said. Mulla Ahmad Shah, a member of Kandahar’s Ulema Shoura — a pro-government council of Islamic clerics, was attacked and killed when he was going to a mosque in the city center, police official Abdul Ahmad said.
Shah was giving religious lessons to students in a mosque which was built by the Taleban’s fugitive leader Mulla Omar. Despite a hunt by thousands of US-led and Afghan troops, he remains at large after nearly four years. Ahmad did not say who might have been behind the attack, but a similar killing on May 29 of a leading cleric was claimed by the Taleban fighters. The fundamentalist Taleban were driven from power by a US-led military operation in late 2001. Its fighters have been waging an insurgency against the US-backed government since then.
A suicide bomber detonated explosives near a major shrine in a northern Afghanistan city yesterday, killing himself but causing no other injuries, police said. The bomber had explosives wrapped around his body and detonated them in a park beside a large shrine in Mazar-e-Sharif, the capital of Balkh province. He was outside the shrine when the explosives went off, according to Sheir Jahn Durani, spokesman for the local police. The bomber’s motive was not immediately clear.
Mazar-e-Sharif, in the country’s far northern region, has been spared much of the violence that has wracked southern and eastern parts of the country. But a roadside bomb tore through a vehicle carrying NATO-led peacekeepers there late last month, killing two Swedish soldiers. On Oct. 29, gunmen killed a British soldier and wounded five others by firing at their vehicle.
“Today at 1.20 p.m. (0850 GMT) a man was killed in an explosion who was either carrying explosives or had them strapped to his body,” Interior Ministry spokesman Yousuf Stanizai told AFP. No one else was hurt in the blast near the Hazrat Ali shrine in the center of Mazar-e-Sharif, he said.
“We don’t know whether it was a suicide attack or the man was just carrying the explosives with him,” Stanizai said. “But we can say it appeared like a suicide attack.” If confirmed, it would be the 10th suicide attack in the past two months. There are almost daily attacks in Afghanistan carried out by rebels from the ousted Taleban regime and their allies, but most of the violence is in the south and the east of the country.
