Clashes between Afghan police and Taliban militants left eight police and two Taliban dead in volatile southern Afghanistan, police said yesterday.
Afghan and coalition forces, meanwhile, arrested five people believed to have been transporting and hiding al-Qaeda and other fighters, the US-led coalition said. The suspects were arrested early yesterday in a compound near Jalalabad in eastern Nangarhar Province, it said in a statement.
Taliban insurgents ambushed a police convoy on Saturday night as it patrolled in Kandahar Province, border security chief General Mohammad Raziq Khan said.
PHOTO: AP
Also on Saturday night in Zabul, Taliban militants attacked police on the main highway between Kabul and Kandahar.
A half-hour gunfight left two Taliban dead and four wounded, Zabul highway police commander Ghulam Jailani said.
KIDNAPPED REPORTER
Meanwhile, militants who kidnapped an Italian reporter must prove he is still alive before any negotiations for his release can begin, Italy's ambassador said.
Taliban insurgents say they kidnapped Daniele Mastrogiacomo -- a reporter with Italian daily newspaper La Repubblica, along with two Afghans who were traveling with him in Nad Ali of Helmand Province on Monday.
There is no proof that the recent statements attributed to the Taliban even come from anyone linked to the kidnapping, Sequi said.
However, Italy's Foreign Ministry said on Saturday evening it believed Mastrogiacomo was alive.
The reporter, a father of two, had been on assignment in Kandahar, the Taliban's former stronghold in southern Afghanistan, when the paper lost contact with him.
CENSORED JOURNALISTS
In related news, the US military asserted that a US soldier was justified in erasing journalists' footage of the aftermath of a suicide bombing and shooting last week, saying it could have compromised a military investigation and led to false public conclusions.
The comments came in response to an Associated Press (AP) protest that a US soldier had forced two freelance journalists working for the news agency to delete photos and video at the scene of violence on March 4 in Barikaw, eastern Afghanistan.
At least eight Afghans were killed and 34 wounded.
"Investigative integrity is one circumstance when civil and military authorities will reluctantly exercise the right to control what a journalist is permitted to document," Colonel Victor Petrenko, chief of staff to the top US commander in eastern Afghanistan, said in a letter on Friday.
He said that photographs or video taken by "untrained people" might "capture visual details that are not as they originally were."
The Associated Press disputed the assertions.
"That is not a reasonable justification for erasing images from our cameras," AP Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll said in New York.
"AP's journalists in Afghanistan are trained, accredited professionals working at an appropriate distance from the bombing scene. In democratic societies, legitimate journalists are allowed to work without having their equipment seized and their images deleted," she said.
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