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.
Through the noise of rushing papers and whirring belts at a print factory in Kyoto, two creators watch their photo essay come to life in broadsheet form — part of an effort to win new audiences in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). Despite the decline of the publishing industry, self-publication and handmade “zine” magazines are growing in popularity in Japan, reflecting the nation’s enduring love of paper in the digital era. While speaking to Agence France-Presse at the plant, his hands black with ink, one of the creators, Kazuma Obara, said: “I think [paper] is a medium that engages all five
‘CROSSING THE LINE’: China’s embassy in Seoul criticized US Forces Korea Commander General Xavier Brunson, asking if his ‘hostile’ remarks were authorized by Washington South Korea and the US are in talks over recent public remarks by the commander of US Forces Korea, Seoul’s presidential office said yesterday, after the comments drew sharp criticism from China. In a recent podcast interview, US Forces Korea Commander General Xavier Brunson described South Korea as “the dagger in the heart of Asia” from China’s east coast, prompting the Chinese embassy in Seoul to say that he had “truly crossed the line.” The interview came amid growing speculation that Washington might seek to expand the role of US Forces Korea in countering the growing regional influence of China, a key
Australian researchers have trained lab-grown brain cells on a silicon computer chip to play the 1990s shooter game Doom and said they are just scratching the surface of what the neurons could be capable of doing. It is the science-fiction work of biotech boffins at Cortical Labs, who researched and developed the technology that harnesses the workings of the brain’s networking system. Each so-called “biological computer” contains about 200,000 living human brain cells, grown from stem cells that were harvested from blood donations. Having mastered the simple computer game Pong, where a paddle is moved up and down to send a ball
France experienced its hottest spring on record, the French weather service said on Tuesday, after an exceptional early heat wave that also broke highs for the season in England and Wales. Meteo-France said the average nationwide temperature over March to May was 13.8°C — about 1.7°C above the norm, and surpassing records set in 2011 and 2020. “The warmest spring since records began in 1900,” it said in a bulletin. All three months were warmer than average, but the onset of an “unprecedented heatwave” late last month pushed the mercury to highs typically seen at the height of the summer. “Our country had never
RSS