KANDAHAR, Afghanistan, 10 April 2005 — Ousted Taleban remnants have killed a senior Afghan provincial official several days after kidnapping him, a Taleban spokesman said yesterday. Sarajuddin, chief of Zabul’s power and water department, was killed after a group of Taleban seized him two days ago outside the town of Qalat, Zabul’s provincial capital, the spokesman said. The murder was confirmed by a local police official.
His killing is the third such murder of a local official in less than a week in the restive south, the former bastion of the Taleban. Taleban guerrillas fatally wounded Gen. Geranai, former deputy head of the Army Corps for the south in neighboring Kandahar province on Thursday, a day after killing a security official of adjacent Helmand province.
The number of attacks by the radical Islamists fell over the winter after they failed to make good on a vow to derail landmark presidential elections in October. But with the onset of spring, low-scale violence linked to Taleban rebels has broken out in several southern and eastern areas of the country. The rebels killed five Afghan policemen in a firefight in Zabul province on Thursday.
Meanwhile, suspected Taleban insurgents beheaded an Afghan politician in southern Afghanistan last week, officials and party sources said yesterday. Lal Mohammad, a top member of Afghanistan Solidarity Party which backed Karzai during the election was beheaded in insurgency-hit Helmand province on Tuesday, party spokesman Massoud Mateen told AFP.
“He was taken away from his house and beheaded,” Mateen said, adding that the evidence pointed to members of the ousted Taliban regime being behind the attack. Mateen said members of Lal Mohammed’s family had already fled his village in the Washir district of the province when the Taliban attacked a second time on Wednesday.
In another development, a US Army team was scheduled to arrive from America yesterday to investigate the cause of the deadliest crash of a US military chopper in Afghanistan, a statement said. The team is due to take over an investigation already under way by the US military at the site of Wednesday’s crash that killed 18 people, including 16 American servicemen, in the desert terrain of Ghazni province, some 120 km to the southwest of the capital.
Local officials and the US military said at the time that the CH-47 Chinook chopper, one of two on a mission in the restive south region, crashed in a sandstorm. The other helicopter arrived back safely in Bagram airfield, the hub of US-led operations in Afghanistan, just north of Kabul. Several US military helicopters have been shot down or crashed in Afghanistan since US-led troops toppled the Taleban in 2001, but Wednesday’s was the deadliest.
Lt. Cindy Moore, a spokesman for the US military in Kabul, said she was not aware whether teams from the United States had been dispatched to investigate previous crashes. She said there was no indication that Taleban fighters were responsible for downing the chopper, as claimed by a Taleban spokesman, or of a powerful blast that some witnesses said they heard before the crash.
The United States has lost more than 100 military personnel since deploying troops to Afghanistan following the Taleban’s fall, but most of the deaths have been in accidents.
Wednesday’s crash came amid renewed violence in Afghanistan and after four US soldiers were killed on March 26 when their vehicle struck a landmine in the southeast of the country.
The bodies of 18 Americans have been recovered and will be repatriated for identification, Moore said. The remains of the 18 dead have been removed from the wreckage and taken to the Bagram air base near Kabul from where they would be flown to the Dover Air Force Base in Delaware for identification, the US military said in a statement.
