Taliban guerrillas kill 10 Afghan policemen
( 2003-08-19 16:59) (Agencies)
Taliban militants killed 10 policemen, including a police chief, in a province south of Kabul in the latest incident in a spate of violence that has claimed more than 90 lives in the past week, officials said on Tuesday.
Abdul Khaliq, police chief of Logar province, and several other senior police officers from the province were among those killed in an ambush in Kharwar district on Monday, Logar's military commander, Dr Fazlullah Mojadidi, told Reuters.
Khaliq had been returning from a funeral in Kharwar for two family members of a police officer who were killed in a rocket attack blamed on the Taliban, Mojadidi said.
"I am told they were in their cars when the incident happened," Mojadidi said. "There is no doubt that the Taliban were behind it."
More than 90 people have been killed in the past week, one of the bloodiest periods since the overthrow of the Taliban in late 2001.
At least 65 people were killed last Tuesday and Wednesday in a series of incidents, including a bomb on a passenger bus, a factional clash, fighting between government troops and Taliban guerrillas and an ambush on an aid group.
More than a dozen more soldiers and guerrillas were reported killed in clashes in the southeast at the weekend.
News of the latest attack came after police said that two Afghans working for a British aid agency were wounded in an attack by Taliban guerrillas in northern Afghanistan at the weekend, the second such incident there in two weeks.
The upsurge in violence across the country has fueled concerns about an increasingly bold and resurgent Taliban movement, which Afghan officials say has been planning attacks from neighboring Pakistan .
It has come within days of NATO taking command of foreign peacekeepers in Kabul and has prompted fresh calls for the force's role to be extended into the provinces, where a 12,500-strong U.S.-led coalition is hunting remnants of the Taliban and their al Qaeda allies.
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