Taliban kill senior Afghan woman police officer

Taliban gunmen shot dead the most high-profile female police officer in Afghanistan on Sunday as she left her home to go to work, officials and the militia said.

Taliban gunmen shot dead the most high-profile female police officer in Afghanistan on Sunday as she left her home to go to work, officials and the militia said.

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The attackers were waiting outside the home of Malalai Kakar, head of the city of Kandahar’s department of crimes against women, and opened fire on her car, Kandahar government spokesman Zalmay Ayoobi told AFP.

“Today between 7 am and 8 am when she was (in her car) outside her house and going to her job, some gunmen attacked,” Ayoobi said. “Malalai Kakar died in front of her house. Her son was wounded.”

A doctor in the city’s main hospital said Kakar, in her late 30s, had been shot in the head. “She died on the spot and her son was badly injured and is in a coma,” said the doctor, who declined to let his name be used.

A spokesman for the extremist Taliban movement, which targets government officials as part of an growing insurgency, said that the assassins were from his group.
“We killed Malalai Kakar,” spokesman Yousuf Ahmadi told AFP. “She was our target, and we successfully eliminated our target.”

An Afghan police official said Sunday that a US-led coalition airstrike apparently targeting a suicide bomb cell in eastern Afghanistan killed three civilians but no militants. Elsewhere, insurgents killed a woman in charge of female police officers.