KANDAHAR, Afghanistan, 20 June 2005 — The Taleban guerrillas said they executed a district police chief and seven other policemen yesterday out of 31 police they were holding prisoner in the troubled southern province of Kandahar. The capture and killing of the men has created a fresh crisis for authorities in Kandahar, the province worst hit by a surge of violence in recent months that has raised fears for parliamentary elections on Sept. 18.
In separate violence in neighboring Helmand province, guerrillas killed a judge, an intelligence official and a guard in the district of Anad-e-Ali to the west of the provincial capital Lashkargah on Friday night, a provincial spokesman said. Overnight, three rockets hit the city of Kandahar, one of which seriously wounded two children, police said.
A senior police officer said on Saturday that Taleban guerrillas had captured 30 policemen and a police chief in attacks on Thursday and Friday on Mian Nishin, a district in the north of Kandahar province, and taken over the main government building. Taleban spokesman Abdul Latif Hakimi said district police chief Nanai Khan, the senior policeman captured, was shot dead with three bullets on the orders of Taleban religious leaders. “At 8:30 this morning we executed Nanai Khan after a fatwa from the mullahs,” he said. “They said his crime was high so he should be executed.”
Also yesterday, United States warplanes killed 15 to 20 suspected Taleban rebels in southern Afghanistan in the latest attack in a renewed wave of violence to hit the country, the US military said. The rebels were killed when US-led troops came under small arms and rocket fire from militants and called in aircraft and attack helicopters in the province of Helmand, the military said .
“US aircraft and attack helicopters engaged the enemy. Initial battle-damage assessments indicate 15 to 20 enemies died,” it added. A vehicle belonging to the attackers was also damaged in the attack, the military said.
The statement said no US-led coalition soldiers were injured in the fighting in Grishk, a district in insurgency-wracked Helmand province, which has been hit by a renewed surge of violence by militants in recent months.
In southeastern Afghanistan, a suspected roadside bomb tore through a UN car carrying electoral workers, damaging the vehicle but causing no casualties, police said . None of the five passengers on board the UN-marked vehicle was wounded when the bomb was detonated by a remote control device in Ali Shir area of Khost province, Mohammad Ayoob, police commander of the province, said.
