Nine people, five of them children, were killed in a suicide bomb attack on an army convoy in Afghanistan on Sunday, said police, while the Taliban hanged three men after accusing them of spying for British troops. The suicide bomber rammed a car into an army convoy in Mehtarlam, the provincial capital Laghman province, and killed two soldiers, said police. The children along with two other civilians were near the attack. “It was a suicide attack, and several civilians were also wounded apart from civilian deaths,” Yar Mohammad, a senior provincial police official, told Reuters. Earlier on Sunday, the Taliban hanged three men from trees in front of residents in the town of Musa Qala in southern Helmand province after accusing them of being spies for NATO’s British troops.
In neighbouring Kandahar province, Taliban guerrillas killed seven policemen in an ambush on Saturday, said provincial police. A blast in Kabul during the day sparked fear among residents, but officials said the army had blown up seized explosives and mines in a controlled explosion.
Also, fresh clashes in southern Afghanistan left three policemen and at least 13 Taliban dead, while a man was killed on Monday when farmers tried to stop police destroying their opium crops, said officials. Taliban fighters stormed a police checkpoint on a key road between the southern capital Kandahar and the town of Spin Boldak, police said. “Three policemen were killed and two wounded,” said Kandahar province police chief Ismatullah Alizai.
Six more Taliban were killed on Sunday in an Afghan and NATO military sweep of the Zahri district in Kandahar. Also on Sunday, warplanes from NATOÂ’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) bombed a house used by Taliban militants in the province of Zabul, a district commander told AFP. Seven Taliban were killed, said the commander named only Obaidullah.
Exchanges of gunfire erupted between opium farmers and police in three districts in eastern Nangarhar province on Monday, said officials. In another attack, militants tied up the overnight caretaker of a boysÂ’ secondary school in southeastern Khost province and planted time bombs that caused heavy damage early on Monday, said police official Wazir Badshah.
Meanwhile, Afghan tribesmen quarrelling over land used machine guns and pistols in a clash on Monday that killed at least 12 people, said lawmakers. The central government has dispatched police to quell the clash in Logar province to the south of the capital, Kabul, they said, adding that two tribes involved had a long-running dispute over land plots in the province.
In another development, six German Tornado jets took off for Afghanistan on Monday to start a surveillance mission that has been heavily criticised in Germany. The planes lifted off from the Jagel base in northern Germany to begin their journey to Afghanistan, where they will be used for reconnaissance flights to assist NATO forces fighting a Taliban resurgence.