Taliban kill Turkish engineer, attack police

KABUL (Reuters) – Taliban gunmen shot dead a Turkish
engineer in Afghanistan on Sunday in the second attack in a
week on foreigners working on a road project in the west of the
country, a provincial governor said.

In a separate attack, Taliban gunmen on motorbikes raided a
police post outside a jail in the southern city of Kandahar,
wounding up to five of the men, the Kandahar provincial
governor said.

The Turkish engineer was traveling with three police guards
in an area on the border of Farah and Nimroz provinces when
Taliban in a vehicle forced them to stop, said the governor of
Nimroz, Ghulam Dastagir Azad.

“They pulled him out, shot him and burned his body,” Azad
said of the Turk. They disarmed the three guards and let them
go, he said.

Azad did not identify the engineer or his company.
Officials at the Turkish embassy were not available for
comment.

A roadside blast in the same area last week killed five
people, including two foreigners working for a firm that
provides security for road construction crews.

Taliban militants have repeatedly attacked U.S.-funded road
works and have killed or kidnapped several foreign workers over
the past year.

Kandahar governor Assadullah Khalid said the Taliban fled
into the night after the attack on the police outside a jail in
the provincial capital, the main base for foreign forces in the
country’s south.

The Taliban were ousted by U.S. and Afghan opposition
forces in late 2001 and have been waging an insurgency ever
since.

The past year was the most costly for U.S. forces since the
2001 invasion with nearly 60 troops killed in combat. About
1,500 Afghans were killed.

Violence has flared since the Taliban said last week they
had launched a spring offensive in their campaign to oust
foreign forces and overthrow the Western-backed government.

In an earlier incident, a Taliban insurgent shot dead four
policemen as they slept after he had pretended to be a traveler
looking for a place to spend the night.

The police let the man stay at their checkpoint and fed him
dinner but at night he grabbed a policeman’s rifle and shot the
four dead, said Amanullah, a police official in the southern
province of Helmand.

“The Taliban guy then fled and we’re trying to find him,”
Amanullah said. The attack happened on Friday night.

Helmand is a hotbed of insurgency and Afghanistan’s main
opium-growing area.

NATO members Britain, the Netherlands and Canada are
sending troops to the volatile Afghan south, where the Taliban
and allied militants are most active, to take over more
responsibilities from U.S. forces.

(Additional reporting by Mirwais Afghan)