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Militants kill soldier, 7 cops
23/11/2007 13:39 - (SA)
Kandahar - Taliban militants killed an Australian soldier in close-quarters fighting and overran a police station on Friday where seven policemen died, security forces said.
Officials said they had also killed several rebels, one of them an "armed female combatant".
The 26-year-old Australian was shot dead during several hours of intense fighting to disrupt bomb-makers in the restive southern province of Uruzgan, the Australian defence force said.
"During this engagement the Taliban sustained heavy casualties, including a number killed and a substantial number detained," Defence Force head Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston told reporters in Sydney.
It was the third loss for the Australia deployment of 900 troops to the Nato-led International Security Assistance Force.
ISAF in Kabul confirmed a soldier had been killed, as well as "a number of Taliban", but could not give details.
About 100km south, Taliban fighters overran a police post early on Friday and killed seven policemen, a police commander said.
Policemen 'slaughtered'
"They killed seven of my policemen and took with them the remaining six," said commander Abdul Hakim Jan, who is in charge of several posts in the Arghandab area of Kandahar province.
The main Taliban spokesperson, Yousuf Ahmadi, confirmed his group was involved. "We slaughtered all the 12 policemen in the police post," Ahmadi said by telephone from an undisclosed location. There was no way to verify the differing tolls.
Small police posts in remote areas are among the main targets of the insurgents, who picked up their anti-government campaign soon after being driven from power in 2001 in a US-led invasion.
More than 700 policemen have been killed in attacks this year.
Separately, a US-led force that operates alongside ISAF announced "several militants were killed" in an operation on Thursday targeted at groups said to be helping foreign fighters taking part in the insurgency.
A coalition soldier was wounded in the fighting in the central province of Ghazni, the force said in a statement.
"After hostilities ceased, coalition forces recovered several weapons and explosives from the dead militants that were destroyed on site," it said.
"During the weapons recovery, coalition forces discovered one of the militants was an armed female combatant."
It would be extremely unusual for a woman to be fighting in conservative Afghanistan, especially with the ultra-Islamic Taliban.
Elsewhere, five children and two women were wounded when a rocket landed on a civilian house a couple of hundred metres short of the headquarters of the governor of the eastern province of Kunar, police said.
"Apparently the governor's office was the target," provincial police chief General Abdul Jalal Jalal said, blaming the attack on Taliban insurgents.
- AFP
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