Deputy governor killed in Afghan mosque suicide attack
The deputy governor of Helmand province and five other people were killed when a suicide bomber blew himself up inside a mosque in southern Afghanistan today, officials said.
The bomber struck in the provincial capital of Lashkar Gah, said provincial police chief Mohammad Hussein Andiwal.
Helmand’s deputy governor, Pir Mohammad, was killed in the blast, said Nisar Ahmad, a provincial health official.
Eleven other people were wounded, Mr Ahmad said.
Helmand is the centre of the world's opium and heroin production, and the focus of intense clashes between militants and British, US and Afghan government forces.
The mosque blast happened hours after another suicide bomber in a car targeted an Afghan army bus in Kabul, killing one civilian and wounding four other people, officials said.
The earlier blast shattered the bus windows and badly damaged a passing taxi in Kabul's Taimani neighbourhood, said police officer Jan Agha. A soldier was among the wounded.
A series of attacks last year targeted buses carrying Afghan security forces, a key element of US efforts to beat back the insurgency gripping the country’s south and east.
In September a suicide bomber blew himself up in an army bus in Kabul, killing 28 soldiers and two civilians. In June a bomb ripped through a bus carrying police instructors in Kabul, killing 35 people.
Last year was Afghanistan’s most deadly since the ousting of the Taliban in a US-led invasion in 2001. More than 6,500 people – mostly insurgents – died in the violence, according to an Associated Press count of figures provided by local and international officials.
Meanwhile, in eastern Nuristan province, militants beheaded four road construction workers and dumped their bodies on the side of the road yesterday, said deputy provincial police chief Mohammad Daoud Nadim.
The four were kidnapped 10 days ago while working on a road project in Kamdesh district, Mr Nadim said.
In Kabul, hundreds of people demanded the release of an Afghan journalist who was sentenced to death last week after he was found guilty of insulting Islam.
The demonstrators from the small, secular Solidarity Party rallied in front of the United Nations office in support of 23-year old Sayed Parwez Kaambakhsh, who was sentenced by a three-judge panel in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif for distributing to journalism students a report he had printed off the internet.
The article asked why Islam permitted men to have four wives but women could not have multiple husbands.
Mr Kaambakhsh has appealed against his conviction.
International human rights groups have condemned the sentence but Afghanistan’s upper house of parliament welcomed the ruling and criticised “international interference” in the matter.
