Motorbike assassins kill Afghan counter-terror official

Taliban gunmen riding motorbikes assassinated an Afghan counter-terror officer today in Kandahar, the birth place of the hardline Islamist militia in southern Afghanistan, police said.

Taliban gunmen riding motorbikes assassinated an Afghan counter-terror officer today in Kandahar, the birth place of the hardline Islamist militia in southern Afghanistan, police said.

HT Image

The officer was sitting in a shop when the attackers opened fire, killing him and wounding a shopkeeper before
making a quick getaway, deputy provincial police chief Mohammad Shah Farooqi told AFP.

The Taliban carried out the attack, militia spokesman Yousuf Ahmadi told AFP by telephone from an unknown location.

Kandahar is the birth place of the Taliban movement and one of the provinces worst affected by their insurgency
against the new Western-backed administration and the 113,000 US and NATO troops based in the country.

Elsewhere in the south, US-led forces intercepted drug smugglers travelling towards Helmand, the heartland of
Afghanistan's opium production on the border with Pakistan, and seized two tons of opium, a local official said.

They were arrested driving two Land Cruisers overnight, said Ghulam Dastagir Azad, governor of western
Nimroz province from where the suspects set off.

In the capital Kabul, customs agents at the international airport seized 16 kilograms of heroin destined
to be smuggled out of the country, said the Afghan finance ministry.