KANDAHAR, Afghanistan: Taleban gunmen shot dead the most high-profile woman police officer in Afghanistan and wounded her teenaged son as she left home to go to work yesterday, officials and the militia said.
Attackers waiting outside the home of Malalai Kakar, head of the city of Kandahar’s Department of Crimes Against Women, opened fire on her car as she left, Kandahar government spokesman Zalmay Ayoobi said.
“Today between 7 a.m. and 8 a.m. when she was (in her car) outside her house and going to her job, some gunmen attacked,” Ayoobi said. “Malalai Kakar died in front of her house. Her son was wounded.”
A doctor in the city’s main hospital said Kakar, in her late 40s, had been shot in the head. “She died on the spot and her son was badly injured and is in coma,” he said on condition of anonymity. Her son, 15, had been driving Kakar to work, police said. The boy later came out of coma but was in a serious condition.
A spokesman for the Taleban, which targets government officials as part of a growing deadly insurgency, said that the assassins were from his group.
“We killed Malalai Kakar,” spokesman Yousuf Ahmadi said. “She was our target, and we successfully eliminated our target.”
President Hamid Karzai condemned the attack, saying in a statement that it was an “act of cowardice” by the “enemies of the peace and welfare and reconstruction of Afghanistan.” The Interior Ministry praised her as a “hero and loyal to her profession.”
Kakar, a mother of six, was known for her courage in one of Afghanistan’s most conservative provinces. A captain in the police force and the most senior policewoman in Kandahar, she headed a team of about 10 women police officers and had reportedly received numerous death threats.
