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Suicide bombers kill 12 people in attack on police station in Afghanistan
Two suicide bombers attacked police stations in southern Afghanistan Monday, killing 10 Afghan policemen and two civilians and underlining the growing threat from a Taliban-led insurgency. The attacks, which also wounded around 30 people, followed a deadly weekend in which nine US and European soldiers were killed along with several civilians and fighters in Afghanistan's spiraling wave of extremist violence.The most deadly was outside the provincial police headquarters in Lashkar Gah, the capital of the turbulent, opium-producing province of Helmand, with the attacker disguised as a policeman in uniform. "Eleven people, nine of them policemen and two of them civilians, were killed in a suicide bomb attack in Lashkar Gah," the Interior Ministry said in a statement. Twenty-eight others, also mostly policemen, were wounded, the statement said. The provincial health department gave a similar toll. A Taliban spokesman, Yousuf Ahmadi, said a member of his militia had carried out the attack and killed 47 policemen - a clear exaggeration. About 17,000 US troops are expected to start deploying to the south in the coming months to reinforce troops under pressure in the area, where several districts have fallen under control of insurgents allied with drug lords. The deputy provincial police chief, who is named only Kamalludin, was at the scene when the bomb exploded but survived unharmed. "I had just arrived with a five-vehicle police convoy. A man wearing police uniform walked towards us and exploded. Two of my bodyguards were also killed," he said. A policeman at the scene said the bomber had walked towards the just-parked convoy and detonated his explosives. "There is blood and human flesh all over where I'm standing right now," he added on condition of anonymity. President Hamid Karzai condemned the attack in statement that said targeting police showed that the insurgents were afraid of the growing force. The European Union, which is training the police, said it was "appalled." Helmand is one of the most intense battlefields in the international fight against the extremist Taliban, who were in government between 1996 and 2001, and their allies in the Al-Qaeda network. Monday's other suicide attack was at the police headquarters in the turbulent Delaram district of southwestern Farah Province, police said. A suicide bomber killed a policeman outside the building with a hand grenade then grabbed the dead man's weapon and ran into the compound, said the police spokesman for western Afghanistan, Abdel-Rauf Ahmadi. Officers fired at the attacker and bombs strapped to his body exploded, he said. Two shopkeepers were wounded. Suicide attacks have been trademarks of the Taliban in the years following the 2001 US-led invasion that toppled the repressive Islamist movement from government. The Taliban on Sunday claimed a blast that killed four US soldiers in the eastern province of Nangarhar hours before two British troops were killed in a blast in Helmand. Three other troops - French, German and British - died in various incidents on Saturday. The spike in violence comes amid growing international alarm about how to counter the unrest in Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan. Posted by: Fred 2009-03-17 |
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