Four Taliban killed while laying bomb on highway

Publish Date: Thursday,21 July, 2005, at 11:01 AM Doha Time

KABUL: Four suspected Taliban militants were killed in southern Afghanistan early yesterday when a bomb they were attempting to plant on a highway exploded, a provincial governor said. “Four Taliban who were trying to plant a remote-controlled bomb in the Langar area, by the side of the highway en route to Tirin Kot, blew themselves up,” Uruzgan governor Jan Mohamed said. “Police discovered the bodies along with four Kalashnikovs,” he said. The area around Tirin Kot in troubled Uruzgan province has been the scene of frequent attacks by militants who often use crudely made bombs. Suspected Taliban militants also attacked a government highway patrol in neighbouring Zabul province late Tuesday, said police official Mohamed Turfan. One militant and a policeman were injured in the gunfight, he said. Taliban spokesman Abdul Latif Hakimi claimed responsibility for the attack. More than three years after the Taliban were ousted in a US-led campaign, their loyalists are waging an escalating guerrilla campaign, mainly in the country’s south and east, ahead of parliamentary elections in September. Some 760 people have died in the violence this year, most of them suspected militants, compared with a death toll of 800 during all of last year. Afghan security forces have seized a huge quantity of explosives intended for use in Taliban bomb attacks on the capital, Kabul, officials said yesterday. At least five people were detained in connection with the discovery on Tuesday of the 880kg of explosives and 5,000 fuses hidden in a house in the eastern city of Jalalabad, Interior Ministry spokesman Lutfullah Mashal said. “Two people were picked up in Jalalabad and during the investigations they told us three other people were waiting for the explosives to be brought to Kabul and used to bomb it,” Mashal said. He gave no more details, but an official in Jalalabad, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the detained men were Taliban militants. Hundreds of people, many of them guerrillas, have died in stepped-up militant violence in the lead up to September 18 elections, the next big step in Afghanistan’s difficult path to stability. Kabul has been the target of bomb attacks in the past, some of which have killed foreign peacekeeping troops. But the city, home to thousands of foreign aid workers and diplomats, has largely been spared the sort of militant violence that has plagued the south and east of the country since the Taliban’s overthrow in late 2001. – Reuters

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