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Militants responsible for torching of two mixed-sex schools in Kabul, police report

Militants torched two mixed-sex schools near the Afghan capital, police said yesterday, and the Taliban said it had kidnapped two teachers and a school superintendent.

Police blamed the attacks on the schools near the small town of Logar, 50km south of Kabul, on the “enemies of Afghanistan” — a phrase that most often refers to Taliban militants.

At one school, they beat and tied up the superintendent and set fire to the eight-classroom building, Logar deputy provincial police chief Abdul Majeed Latifi said.

The roof collapsed and windows, doors and furniture were badly damaged, he said.

At roughly the same time, attackers set fire to a nearby school. The blaze was put out by residents and police and only the principal’s office and one classroom were affected, Latifi said.

“This was also a mixed boys and girls school, where girls study in the morning and boys in the afternoon,” he said.

Afghanistan’s education system has been under attack for years with most incidents blamed on the Islamist Taliban, which denied girls education during its 1996-2001 grip on power and is today fighting the new government.

Violence left 220 pupils and teachers dead last year, the education ministry said last month. The UN’s children’s organization UNICEF said Monday that there had been 236 attacks on schools last year, with 23 recorded so far this year.

Meanwhile, two employees of a US security company have gone missing in Afghanistan’s western province of Herat, a company official said on Tuesday.

The Indian and Nepalese workers were traveling in a rented taxi when they went missing in Adraskan district on Monday evening, the official said, adding the driver had also disappeared, but the car was abandoned.

Adraskan lies on a main highway where suspected Taliban insurgents and criminals are usually active. The two employees worked for the US security company EOD Technology, which has been involved in helping a newly formed Afghan police force in Herat.

“They have gone missing. We do not know what has happened to them,” Sayed Ibrar Hashimi, head of EOD Technology in Herat told reporters.

Abdul Rashid Popal, district chief of Adraskan, said the pair were kidnapped, but he could not say by who or give a motive.

Police also say gunmen have kidnapped two Indian road construction workers and a taxi driver in western Afghanistan.

Police spokesman Abdul Rauf Ahmadi says the Indians were abducted on Monday in Herat Province as they were traveling on the main highway toward Kabul.
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