Hundreds of police swarmed through a southern Afghan village yesterday, searching house-to-house for the assailant who sprayed a US company's helicopter with gunfire, killing the Australian pilot and wounding two passengers.
Police arrested 30 suspected Taliban members and seized five AK-47 assault rifles in Thaloqan village, about 60km southwest of the provincial capital, Kandahar, said a police official, General Salim Khan.
Four foreigners and an Afghan interpreter had traveled in the helicopter on Sunday to inspect the construction of a clinic.
They were about to leave when a man with a Kalashnikov rifle attacked the helicopter and fled, said Khalid Pashtoon, spokesman for the governor of Kandahar province.
The chopper's Australian pilot was killed and an American woman who was helping set up the clinic was seriously wounded, a US Embassy spokesman said on condition of anonymity.
A security guard also suffered serious injuries, the US Embassy said in a statement issued late on Sunday.
Officials said the helicopter belonged to The Louis Berger Group, an engineering firm based in East Orange, New Jersey. The company oversees infrastructure projects in southern Afghanistan.
In Australia, Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said yesterday that the pilot came from South Australia state, but declined to release his name or other details until the man's relatives were informed of his death.
"It's very sad that he's gone," Downer said. "He was there to help the people of Afghanistan."
Afghan forces immediately began a manhunt in the area, where rebels of Afghanistan's former ruling Taliban regime are active. Pashtoon said the village was home to the Hezb-e-Islami group of renegade warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a key Taliban ally.
After the shooting, about 100 US troops and 100 Afghan forces cordoned off the site as a US military helicopter hoisted away the bullet-riddled chopper.
In a statement, the US military condemned the shooting as a "senseless and violent criminal attack," and called on tribal elders and other locals to hand over the assailant.
A man claiming to speak for the Taliban, Abdul Samad, telephoned reporters in Kabul about six hours after the attack and said the hard-line Islamic militia was responsible.
That claim could not be independently confirmed, and Samad's description of the shooting -- which he said involved eight guerrillas -- was at odds with witness accounts.
A US military quick reaction force evacuated the injured people to a military hospital at Kandahar airfield, said military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Bryan Hilferty.
Insurgent attacks in lawless southern and eastern Afghanistan have become commonplace over the past year, despite continuing efforts to hunt down the Taliban and their allies.
US military officials say the rebels have started going after "soft" civilian targets after incurring heavy losses in battles with coalition forces in the middle of last year.
The attacks appear to be aimed at undermining the US-backed government of President Hamid Karzai and reconstruction efforts in the country, which is trying to emerge from a quarter-century of war.
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