Taleban threaten to kidnap Prince Harry

KABUL: The Afghan Taleban said yesterday they were doing everything in their power to try to kidnap or assassinate Britain's Prince Harry, who arrived in Afghanistan last week to fly attack helicopters.
Queen Elizabeth's grandson is in Afghanistan on a four-month tour, based out of Camp Bastion in the volatile Helmand province, where he will be on the front line in the NATO-led war against Taleban insurgents.
Meanwhile, a suicide bomber tore through a crowd of Afghan demonstrators yesterday, killing 21 people in the northern city of Kunduz, a hospital doctor said, amid fears that the toll could rise further.
Doctor Shir Jan, who works at the Kunduz central hospital, said 21 bodies — one of them a woman — had been brought in after the attack. Both civilians and policemen were among the dead, he added.
A policeman deployed to man the demonstration, Gul Agha, told AFP that 18 people had died, including six civilians and 12 law enforcement police.
There were local reports that the demonstration was in support of a local warlord accused of killing civilians.
yesterday’s bombing comes just two days after a suicide bomber, whom Afghan police identified as a teenager, blew himself up outside NATO headquarters in Kabul, killing six youngsters aged 12 to 17.
The Taleban insurgency that has raged for 10 years against Western troops and the Kabul government is traditionally centered in the south and the east, but Kunduz in the north has seen an increase in violence in recent years.
Last month, a bomb attached to a motorcycle killed 10 people in a market elsewhere in the province, in Archi district near the border with Tajikistan.
Separately, the United States handed control of the controversial giant Bagram jail and its 3,000 suspected Taleban inmates to Afghan authorities yesterday.
Hundreds of Afghan soldiers watched as an Afghan flag was hoisted in front of the prison at the huge US-run airfield north of Kabul, as part of a plan to withdraw foreign troops from combat operations in 2014.
“Today is a historical and glorious day for Afghanistan where Afghans are able to take the charge of the prison themselves,” acting Defense Minister Enayatullah Nazari told a large crowd including US military officials.
In a move that has angered the Afghan government, the US plans to keep at least one block at the prison, where any suspected Taleban fighters captured in future raids will be held before being handed over.
Afghanistan has long sought control of the sprawling prison which has been likened to Guantanamo in Cuba and Abu Graib in Iraq for its association with torture and long detention times.
Prisoners have often been held for years without trial, and activists say they will be vulnerable to more rights abuses once the handover is complete.