Taliban militants dragged a schoolteacher out of a mosque in Afghanistan and cut off his ears as “punishment” for working for the government, an education official said.
The rebels took another dozen people, most of them elderly men, out of the mosque in the southern province of Zabul and beat them up on similar charges, provincial education chief Mohammad Nabi Khushal said on Sunday.
The men had burst into the mosque while dozens of worshippers were in a late night prayer session on Saturday and singled out primary school teacher Bismillah Khan, Khushal said, blaming Taliban rebels.
“They took him out of the mosque and cut off his ears. They said: ‘Anyone working for the government will be punished like this,’” he said.
The teacher, who worked at a refurbished school reopened five months ago, was on Sunday admitted to a US military-run medical facility in the area for treatment, he said.
MILITANTS?
A villager who refused to be identified confirmed the incident by telephone. The rebels had introduced themselves as Taliban militants, he said.
But a spokesman for the extremist militia, Yousuf Ahmadi, said the Taliban were not involved.
“Whoever they were, they were not our mujahidin,” Ahmadi said.
The rebel group has killed dozens of Afghans employed by the government or its international military or development partners as part of a campaign to undermine support for Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s government.
Education is one of the successes of post-Taliban Afghanistan with about 6.2 million children enrolled in school, up from 1 million in 2001, when the extremist Taliban regime was removed.
It is also one of the main targets of a Taliban insurgency. Attacks left 220 pupils and teachers dead last year, the education ministry says.
BOMBING
Meanwhile, a bomb in Shindand District killed three bodyguards of a district chief, including his son.
Lal Mohammad Omarzai said the bomb was apparently hidden in a three-wheel motorcycle near the district center and remotely detonated as his two-vehicle convoy passed.
“Three of my bodyguards, one of them my son, were martyred and five others were wounded,” said Omarzai, who was not hurt in the attack.
Shindand , home to armed rebels, is the focus of one of the biggest claims of civilian casualties in air strikes since international troops arrived in Afghanistan to remove the Taliban.
An Afghan investigation and a UN rights team have said more than 90 civilians, many of them women and children, were killed in Aug. 22 strikes.
The US military says only five to seven civilians were killed along with 30 to 35 militants.
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