|
Taliban Commander's Aide Accused of Attack
 Security forces arrested a deputy of a top Taliban commander Thursday for a bomb attack that wounded three U.S. soldiers, and an American soldier died when an Air Force helicopter crashed on a nighttime mission to rescue an election worker. A homemade bomb destroyed two American Humvees in southeastern Paktika province near the Pakistan border, wounding three U.S. soldiers, one critically, and their Afghan interpreter, a U.S. military statement said. Paktika Gov. Gulab Mungal said Afghan forces later arrested a suspect in the attack, whom he identified only as a deputy of Jalaluddin Haqqani, a front-line Taliban commander who served briefly as tribal affairs minister before the fall of the hard-line Islamic regime in late 2001. He remains at large. Mungal said several land mines, explosives and bomb-making instructions written in Arabic were seized from the suspect's house. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack on the Americans, but Abdul Hakim Latifi, who claims to speak for the Taliban, vowed Thursday the rebels would continue their "holy war" against the U.S.-led coalition forces and the Afghan government. "If the government holds elections 100 times this will not change the Taliban's commitment to jihad. The Taliban will pursue jihad until death," he told The Associated Press by satellite phone from an undisclosed location.
Posted by: Fred 2004-10-21 |
|
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=46575 |