KABUL, 16 June 2005 — Suspected Taleban militants killed a doctor and six medical attendants during a spate of violent incidents in southern Afghanistan that left a total of 17 people dead, officials said yesterday.
The seven medics were shot dead in Moghgay Tana, close to the Pakistani border in Khost province, late on Tuesday, police told AFP. “Dr. Abdul Hanan and his six colleagues were killed by armed men in Moghgay clinic,” said Gen. Almat Gull Mangal, commander of Khost border forces. “It is the work of Taleban and Al-Qaeda to kill doctors,” he added.
In a separate incident in the Sabari district of Khost on Tuesday, a civilian station wagon hit a newly planted land mine, killing two people. “A vehicle ran over a land mine and two passengers were killed as a result,” said Mangal. The same day in the neighboring Paktia province, a police chief was attacked and his bodyguard killed by a bomb.
“The Jani Khalil district police chief was wounded with his driver and a bodyguard. His second bodyguard died when a roadside bomb hit his vehicle,” Mangal said. Afghanistan has been hit by a fresh wave of violence in recent weeks as militants increase their attacks on government and US targets in the lead up to the country’s first post-Taleban parliamentary elections.
At least seven suspected Taleban militants were killed and 10 were injured in an operation by Afghan soldiers in the southern province of Kandahar on Tuesday.
Meanwhile, an Afghan district police chief has been arrested on suspicion of involvement in the killing of five staff of Nobel prize-winning aid agency Medecins sans Frontieres last year, the Interior Ministry said yesterday. MSF, called Doctors Without Borders in English, pulled out of Afghanistan last year after more than 20 years citing lack of progress in an investigation into the killing of the workers on a remote road in the northwestern province of Badghis last June.
