Two men have been arrested following the shocking murders of 11 Chinese construction workers in Afghanistan, according to the government in Beijing, but mystery remains as to who masterminded the brutal attack.
China's official Xinhua news agency reported that two people had been detained over the killings while a provincial police chief said one man, a local, had been arrested and that investigations were continuing.
PHOTO: AP
"Based on the information we received, we arrested one suspect called Mullah Tor," Mutalib Bek told reporters on Friday from northeastern Kunduz province. "He was on his way toward Kunduz," city when he was picked up, he said.
The Taliban militia has denied responsibility for the killings, which occurred in the early hours of Thursday as 100 Chinese engineers, laborers and managers slept in tents pitched on a plain in northeast Kunduz province, some 36km south of the provincial capital of the same name.
"We deny the accusation of killing the Chinese workers in Kunduz province of Afghanistan," Abdul Latif Hakimi, who claims to represent the ousted militia, told reporters on Friday by telephone from an undisclosed location.
Hakimi said the deaths "should not have happened."
Local police were also unsure as to why the Chinese, along with one Afghan police guard, were cut down by machinegun fire as they slept in tents pitched inside a building site set back some 200m to 300m from the road.
The killers appeared to know where to direct their fire, as the group of 20 who were armed with machine guns had attacked the most crowded of the tents, according to a journalist who viewed the site.
Seven of the eight people in this first tent died and one was wounded.
Most of those killed had only arrived in the area, some 200km of Kabul, the day before.
A spokesman for President Hamid Karzai, in the US after attending the G8 summit and the funeral of former US president Ronald Reagan, said the government could not say who was responsible for the attack.
"We still say whoever it was, it is the enemies of Afghanistan, and it's people who are against reconstruction," spokesman Khaleeq Ahmad said from the US on Friday. "We can't really say who."
However, he stressed that the incident would not weaken the government's resolve to hold elections as planned in September despite Taliban threats of violence at the polls.
"Elections must go on," Ahmad said. "The incident that happened should not stop the election process."
Kunduz was one of the last pockets of Taliban resistance following the 2001 US-led offensive against the regime following the September 11 terror attacks in the US.
Despite denying responsibility for the latest attack, the Taliban spokesman said his militants were behind the June 2 killing of three Europeans working for Medecins Sans Frontieres and their two Afghan colleagues in the country's northwest.
Hakimi told reporters on Friday that the ousted extremists were organizing for a "holy uprising" ahead of the general elections.
"Taliban are an organized power. You will witness organized and regular attacks in the north of the country, same as the south," he said. "We have made this holy uprising to bring an Islamic government to the country and fight the Americans who want to weaken Islam in Afghanistan."
The US military, which leads some 20,000 international troops in the country, said yesterday that the two latest attacks in the north could not be taken as an indication of the spread of violence in the south against Taliban al-Qaeda and other militants around the country.
"Those are two attacks that we have not necessarily attributed strictly to anti-coalition militia," coalition spokesman US Lieutenant Colonel Tucker Mansager said.
"It's hard to say conclusively that anti-coalition militia activity has spread to the north and northwest," he added.
International peacekeepers yesterday described the Kunduz killings as a "brutal and unprecedented terrorist attack."
‘MOTHER’ OF THAILAND: In her glamorous heyday in the 1960s, former Thai queen Sirikit mingled with US presidents and superstars such as Elvis Presley The year-long funeral ceremony of former Thai queen Sirikit started yesterday, with grieving royalists set to salute the procession bringing her body to lie in state at Bangkok’s Grand Palace. Members of the royal family are venerated in Thailand, treated by many as semi-divine figures, and lavished with glowing media coverage and gold-adorned portraits hanging in public spaces and private homes nationwide. Sirikit, the mother of Thai King Vajiralongkorn and widow of the nation’s longest-reigning monarch, died late on Friday at the age of 93. Black-and-white tributes to the royal matriarch are being beamed onto towering digital advertizing billboards, on
Indonesia was to sign an agreement to repatriate two British nationals, including a grandmother languishing on death row for drug-related crimes, an Indonesian government source said yesterday. “The practical arrangement will be signed today. The transfer will be done immediately after the technical side of the transfer is agreed,” the source said, identifying Lindsay Sandiford and 35-year-old Shahab Shahabadi as the people being transferred. Sandiford, a grandmother, was sentenced to death on the island of Bali in 2013 after she was convicted of trafficking drugs. Customs officers found cocaine worth an estimated US$2.14 million hidden in a false bottom in Sandiford’s suitcase when
CAUSE UNKNOWN: Weather and runway conditions were suitable for flight operations at the time of the accident, and no distress signal was sent, authorities said A cargo aircraft skidded off the runway into the sea at Hong Kong International Airport early yesterday, killing two ground crew in a patrol car, in one of the worst accidents in the airport’s 27-year history. The incident occurred at about 3:50am, when the plane is suspected to have lost control upon landing, veering off the runway and crashing through a fence, the Airport Authority Hong Kong said. The jet hit a security patrol car on the perimeter road outside the runway zone, which then fell into the water, it said in a statement. The four crew members on the plane, which
POWER ABUSE WORRY: Some people warned that the broad language of the treaty could lead to overreach by authorities and enable the repression of government critics Countries signed their first UN treaty targeting cybercrime in Hanoi yesterday, despite opposition from an unlikely band of tech companies and rights groups warning of expanded state surveillance. The new global legal framework aims to bolster international cooperation to fight digital crimes, from child pornography to transnational cyberscams and money laundering. More than 60 countries signed the declaration, which means it would go into force once ratified by those states. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres described the signing as an “important milestone,” and that it was “only the beginning.” “Every day, sophisticated scams destroy families, steal migrants and drain billions of dollars from our economy...
RSS