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| Air strike kills 30 Taliban in Khost, say police |
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| KHOST (Reuters): About 30 Taliban insurgents were killed in a NATO-led air strike in eastern Afghanistan after they attacked an Afghan police post, a police official and the alliance said.
Afghan border police commander Sayed Nabi Mullahkhil said a police checkpoint in eastern Khost province was attacked by militants overnight.
The privately owned Tolo TV station said 26 insurgents were killed, including one fighter from Chechnya.
A spokesman for the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Kabul confirmed an air strike was carried out by foreign troops in Khost late on Saturday after Afghan police called for their assistance. "Afghan forces came under attack and asked for assistance and we provided it in the form of air support," the spokesman said, declining to give any details of casualties.
General Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, has identified Khost province, the power base of insurgents loyal to the Haqqani family, as a battlefront, along with the neighbouring provinces of Paktia and Paktika.
Meanwhile, a policeman went on a shooting spree killing four of his colleagues before being gunned down by soldiers in the southwest of Afghanistan, a provincial governor said Sunday.
In an incident officials say they believe to be unrelated to the country's spiralling Taliban insurgency, the officer began shooting on Saturday night in Nimroz province.
"Last night, in Khashrod district, a policeman had an argument with his colleagues, he opened fire and killed four of them," provincial governor Ghulam Dastagir Azad told media. "Then he took a civilian car and left. He drove to the neighbouring Dilaram district where he crossed an Afghan army checkpoint. He didn't stop and the soldiers shot (at) him. "He returned fire and wounded a soldier before getting killed."
Azad said investigators thought it unlikely that the officer was a member of the Taliban, whose uprising has become increasingly virulent in recent years, especially in neighbouring Helmand province. "We don't believe he was with the Taliban because he didn't steal the weapons of the policemen he killed and he didn't steal a police car but a civilian one.
"He was from Logar province and we believe he was not mentally fit. We're investigating the incident." |
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