Suicide attack on Afghan anti-drugs team kills 19
JALALABAD, Afghanistan (AFP) — A suicide bomb tore through a team preparing to eradicate opium poppy fields in eastern Afghanistan on Tuesday, killing 19 people, most of them policemen, the government said.
The hardline Taliban movement said one of its men carried out the attack in the small town of Khogyani in Nangarhar province, near the insurgency-hit border with Pakistan.
The bomb struck as a counternarcotics team was preparing to travel to opium fields to destroy illegal poppy crops, the interior ministry said in a statement.
"Nineteen people including 12 police and seven civilians lost their lives and 41 others were wounded," it said.
The dead included an Afghan working on a United Nations counternarcotics programme and a child, Nangarhar governor Gul Agha Sherzai told reporters in the city of Jalalabad 25 kilometres (15 miles) from Khogyani.
The wounded included two foreign journalists -- a French national and an Australian -- reporting on the poppy eradication mission, he said.
"Most of the civilians wounded were people who were hired to carry out the eradication," the governor added.
Afghanistan produces more than 90 percent of the world's opium and officials say the lucrative trade is in part funding an insurgency led by the Taliban and involving a range of militants.
The interior ministry said the attack was proof of the "ties between opium cultivation and terrorist circles."
The United Nations mission added that "the circumstances of this attack illustrate the unmistakable bonds of partnership between terrorists and drug traffickers."
The blast left the area covered in flesh and blood, according to a witness who had brought wounded to the main hospital in Jalalabad.
"Locals were sitting on the ground as the district authorities, district police chief, district governor and others were talking to them, saying they should not grow opium," said the man, who would not give his name.
"I saw a young boy who was carrying white papers wandering around the crowd, pretending he was applying for something at the district headquarters.
"All of a sudden I saw a big, red flame from among the crowd where the boy was standing and a big explosion followed," he told AFP.
"People were running and some were screaming. I don't remember much," he said.
A man claiming to be a Taliban commander for the region told an AFP reporter by telephone that the suicide bombing was carried out by a militant from his group.
The Taliban were in government between 1996 and 2001 and were ousted in a US-led invasion for harbouring Al-Qaeda leaders after the 9/11 suicide attacks.
Their insurgency was at its bloodiest last year, and routinely steps up over spring, with a surge in violence in the past weeks.
A soldier with the NATO-led force was killed and another wounded in an attack Tuesday in a known militant stronghold 60 kilometres northeast of Kabul, the alliance's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said.
It gave no details of the incident, which took to 47 the number of foreign soldiers to die in Afghanistan this year, most of them fighting the Taliban and other radicals.
US Marines who deployed in March to reinforce ISAF meanwhile pushed ahead Tuesday with a major operation to take control of a Taliban stronghold in the southernmost district of Garmser.
Garmser is an area of difficult desert terrain that extends down to the Pakistan border across which Taliban reinforcements and weapons arrive to enter the insurgency.
The operation was launched before midnight Monday to secure the district centre, which is only partially in government control, the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit said.
The soldiers Tuesday encountered "light resistance in the form of small arms fire and rocket propelled grenades from buildings along routes the Marines are securing," it said.
