A suicide bomber in police uniform blew himself up in Afghanistan's eastern city of Khost yesterday, killing at least 10 people and wounding more than 40, a provincial official said.
The attacker, riding a motorcycle, detonated his explosives in a busy meat market in the city, provincial deputy intelligence director Mira Jan told reporters.
At least 10 people were killed, most of them civilians, provincial public health director Gul Mohammad Mohammadi said. More than 40 were wounded, four of whom were in a coma, he said.
Security officials in the city had been on the lookout for an attacker since Saturday, Jan said, adding that at least three of the dead were shopkeepers.
Hours before yesterday's blast, a bomb hidden in a camera exploded in a shop in a central market, killing one man and wounding seven, officials said.
Mohammadi reported that the wounded had said the attack was linked to a private argument, not the raging Taliban insurgency, and had followed a fight between two rival groups late on Saturday.
Khost city, near the border with Pakistan, has in recent months been hard-hit by violent attacks linked to the insurgency as the Taliban have stepped up the use of Iraq-style suicide bombings and ambushes.
On April 14 a suicide bomber blew himself up at the gate of the border police headquarters in the city, killing four police officers, three policemen and a civilian.
More than 30 suicide blasts have occurred around Afghanistan this year, killing more than 60 people -- most of them civilians -- although many of the blasts were directed at military targets.
On Saturday, the insurgents vowed a new round of attacks against Afghan and foreign troops, promising to focus more attention on the relatively peaceful north.
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the