Police kill 11 suspected Taliban in Afghanistan

Police killed 11 suspected Taliban in two separate operations in southern Afghanistan overnight as a purported insurgent spokesman claimed today that militants killed a Turkish national kidnapped last month.

The renewed violence came a day after three bombings killed at least 20 people, including four Canadian soldiers, across Afghanistan.

The 11 suspected Taliban were killed in clashes in Helmand province, said Ghulam Rasool, a regional police chief. Four others were wounded.

Police recovered the militants’ bodies and their weapons after the operations that began last night and continued into today, he said. There were no police casualties.

Qari Yousaf Ahmadi, who claims to speak for the Taliban, today claimed insurgents killed Mustafa Asimi, a Turkish national, who had been kidnapped in late August along with another Turk who was earlier shot dead.

An official with Turkish company Konlit, for whom the victims worked, said a security officer under the name Mustafa Semih Turfal had been kidnapped in August, but had no information on his whereabouts.

It was not immediately possible to verify Ahmadi’s claim nor explain the different names given by insurgents and the company official.

Ahmadi claimed militants killed the Turkish national in the Yakhthal area of southern Helmand’s Gereshk district after his company failed to meet demands to leave Afghanistan.

The claim comes a day after police killed eight militants and wounded four in the Khakhtapul area of Helmand province’s Garmser district, Rasool said. A separate clash in the Miankhail area of the same district killed three Taliban, he said.

Some of those killed were Pakistanis, Rasool claimed without providing further details.

President Hamid Karzai condemned Monday’s triple bombings that killed at least 20 in Kandahar, Farah and Kabul provinces as “heinous acts of terrorism (which) are against the values of Islam and humanity.”

The deadliest attack happened in the usually calm western city of Herat, leaving 12 dead and 17 wounded, including the deputy police chief.

A suicide car bombing in the capital, Kabul, killed at least four policemen and wounded one officer and 10 civilians.

Four Canadian soldiers were also killed in a suicide bombing in Kandahar province’s Panjwayi district, a day after Nato troops ended a two-week anti-Taliban operation that they claimed killed at least 510 insurgents.

“It does appear that they are resorting to these despicable tactics after the pressure we have them under in their strongholds,” a Nato spokesman, Maj Luke Knittig, said in Kabul.

Afghanistan has been suffering the heaviest insurgent attacks since the Taliban was toppled in late 2001 for harbouring al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden.