Suspected Taliban insurgents ambushed an influential former governor in an Afghan city yesterday, shooting him dead along with his bodyguard and three others, police said.
Militants used AK-47 assault rifles to shoot at a car carrying the ex-governor, Taj Mohammed Qari Baba, near his home in eastern city of Ghazni, said Ali Ahmad, the chief of the provincial police force's criminal investigation department.
Two of the dead were relatives of the ex-governor and one was his driver, he said.
Baba was a powerful supporter of the government in Ghazni. He twice served as the province's governor -- between 1992 and 1995, and then in 2002, after the Taliban was ousted months earlier. Prior to that, he was a commander in the mujahidin fighting Soviet occupying forces in the 1980s.
Taliban critic
Baba, who was believed to have been in his 60s, was a vocal supporter of the US-backed government and a critic of the Taliban.
Two suspected insurgents were arrested near the site of the shooting and were being questioned, Ahmad said.
The killing is the latest of prominent Afghans who have been targeted by the Taliban for speaking out against them and comes amid a major resurgence in insurgent violence.
A week ago, a suicide car bomb hit the head of the upper house of the Afghan Parliament as he was traveling in the capital, Kabul, injuring him and killing four other people.
Several pro-government clerics have also been killed, many of them just days after condemning the rebel movement.
A statement attributed to Taliban leader Mullah Omar was issued on Thursday, warning of a wave of rebels attacks in coming months as snows melt on the high mountain passes the guerillas use.
Policemen killed
Meanwhile, a blast killed nine Afghan policemen as they were bringing back the bodies of four Macedonians kidnapped and killed by the Taliban and dumped in a valley, the Kandahar provincial governor said yesterday.
Governor Assadullah Khalid had said on Friday five policemen were killed after the bodies of the Macedonians were discovered hidden under brush and sticks in a valley near the border with Helmand Province.
"At first, the information we got was five policemen were killed and three wounded," Khalid said.
"But after the bodies were brought to Kandahar, we found that nine policemen had been killed," he said.
Several police vehicles were returning with the bodies when one was hit by a blast, apparently caused by a mine, he said. Three policemen were wounded.
The Taliban said that they kidnapped the Macedonians, who were working for a services company, on March 11.
A Taliban spokesman later said the four had been executed on the orders of Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar and their bodies dumped.
"These people had come to Afghanistan at America's behest, therefore they should be sentenced to death," Taliban spokesman Qari Mohammad Yousuf quoted the order as saying.
An official at the Ecolog cleaning contractor in Kabul said the Macedonians worked for the company.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
RSS