Two US troops were killed and three wounded by a mine detonated by remote control in Afghanistan's south-central province of Uruzgan, the US military said yesterday.
"We had five casualties, two killed in action and three injured in action," US military spokesman Scott Nelson told reporters, adding the troops were all US nationals.
They had been on a routine patrol Thursday in the Deh Rawood district in the south of the province when the mine was detonated as they passed by, he said.
A remote-controlled bomb also killed five people in the east of the violence-plagued country, an Afghan official said.
The five, who included a policeman, were killed in eastern Kunar province late Friday after the bomb exploded near a truck supplying food to US bases.
The truck had been stopped and set on fire by suspected loyalists of the ousted Taliban regime and the blast happened after a crowd had gathered, provincial governor Saeed Fazel Akbar Agha told reporters.
The explosion was on the main road in Dap area of Asmar district of Kunar province some 125km east of capital Kabul.
"The incident occurred after a truck supplying food to US bases in Kunar was stopped and set on fire by enemies of Afghanistan," the governor said.
"District police went to the site and villagers were there as well when the remote control bomb went off."
Meanwhile, vote counting in Afghanistan's landmark election resumed yesterday after a break for a religious holiday, with early results showing interim leader Hamid Karzai ahead in the vote for this country's first democratically elected president.
The count was put on hold for a day on Friday as Muslims marked the start of the fasting month of Ramadan.
Election spokeswoman Silvana Puizina said counting had resumed at 9am in the capital, Kabul, and in other counting centers across the country.
"We should see a full day's counting. It seems to be moving along quite nicely," she said.
Earlier, however, a preacher at Kabul's main mosque warned that Afghans won't stand for arrogance in whomever wins.
"If the president becomes too arrogant, we will cut him down. Isn't that right?" Mullah Obeid-ul Rahman said to hundreds of worshippers, drawing cries of "God is great!"
Karzai, who has led this predominantly Muslim country since the US-led forces ousted the Taliban regime in late 2001, is widely expected to win the Oct. 9 vote.
The UN-backed election, which cost about US$200 million to stage, has generated huge interest among Afghans, who are aching for peace after conflicts spanning the Soviet occupation of the 1980s, a murderous civil war in the early 1990s and then the Taliban's tyrannical rule.
Many see Karzai as a bridge to the country's international backers and a leader untainted by the fighting. But they are impatient for him to deliver on pledges to rebuild their impoverished country.
Of 35,986 valid votes tallied in six northern and central provinces during the first day of counting on Thursday, Karzai won 20,213, or 56.2 percent of the total, according to the official election Web site. If he keeps that up, he'll secure the simple majority needed to avoid a run-off vote with his closest rival.
Former Education Minister Yunus Qanooni, expected to be Karzai's closest challenger, was running at 17.2 percent, ahead of ethnic Uzbek warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum with 15 percent. No other candidate mustered more than 2.5 percent.
The tally represented only a tiny fraction of the estimated 8 million votes cast. Counting hasn't started yet in the Pashtun-dominated south, where Karzai is expected to make his strongest showing.
Final results are due at the end of October, although it should be clear who has won after about a week.
Counting had been delayed for five days while a panel of foreign experts probed allegations of electoral fraud, including multiple voting, ballot-box stuffing and voter intimidation. And on Friday, the 1,000 Afghan counting staff were off work to celebrate the start of Ramadan. Counting was to resume yesterday.
‘CHILD PORNOGRAPHY’: The doll on Shein’s Web site measure about 80cm in height, and it was holding a teddy bear in a photo published by a daily newspaper France’s anti-fraud unit on Saturday said it had reported Asian e-commerce giant Shein (希音) for selling what it described as “sex dolls with a childlike appearance.” The French Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF) said in a statement that the “description and categorization” of the items on Shein’s Web site “make it difficult to doubt the child pornography nature of the content.” Shortly after the statement, Shein announced that the dolls in question had been withdrawn from its platform and that it had launched an internal inquiry. On its Web site, Le Parisien daily published a
China’s Shenzhou-20 crewed spacecraft has delayed its return mission to Earth after the vessel was possibly hit by tiny bits of space debris, the country’s human spaceflight agency said yesterday, an unusual situation that could disrupt the operation of the country’s space station Tiangong. An impact analysis and risk assessment are underway, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) said in a statement, without providing a new schedule for the return mission, which was originally set to land in northern China yesterday. The delay highlights the danger to space travel posed by increasing amounts of debris, such as discarded launch vehicles or vessel
RUBBER STAMP? The latest legislative session was the most productive in the number of bills passed, but critics attributed it to a lack of dissenting voices On their last day at work, Hong Kong’s lawmakers — the first batch chosen under Beijing’s mantra of “patriots administering Hong Kong” — posed for group pictures, celebrating a job well done after four years of opposition-free politics. However, despite their smiles, about one-third of the Legislative Council will not seek another term in next month’s election, with the self-described non-establishment figure Tik Chi-yuen (狄志遠) being among those bowing out. “It used to be that [the legislature] had the benefit of free expression... Now it is more uniform. There are multiple voices, but they are not diverse enough,” Tik said, comparing it
Prime ministers, presidents and royalty on Saturday descended on Cairo to attend the spectacle-laden inauguration of a sprawling new museum built near the pyramids to house one of the world’s richest collections of antiquities. The inauguration of the Grand Egyptian Museum, or GEM, marks the end of a two-decade construction effort hampered by the Arab Spring uprisings, the COVID-19 pandemic and wars in neighboring countries. “We’ve all dreamed of this project and whether it would really come true,” Egyptian Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly told a news conference, calling the museum a “gift from Egypt to the whole world from a
RSS