February 2, 2003

Eight arrested for fatal blast in Afghanistan
Sunday February 2, 1:52 AM AFP
Eight people were arrested in connection with a powerful explosion that tore apart a minibus in southern Afghanistan killing most of its passengers, officials said, as the death toll from the blast was sharply reduced.

The arrests came as a what was believed landmine explosion in southwestern Nimroz province claimed the lives of five soldiers and injured four others.

Khalid Pashtun, a spokesman for the governor of Kandahar province, told AFP the men arrested Saturday were suspected of planting a landmine on a road south of the main southern city of Kandahar city which exploded on Friday.

The spokesman added that initial casualty fears appear to have been overestimated, revising down the death toll from 17 to "around nine", with two survivors including the driver.

"The damage was so bad, it was hard to tell how many people were killed on the bus," he said.

"Its driver had told us he had 19 passengers, so we feared the worst. But it appears that some of the people had got off the bus during its journey."

Witnesses say the powerful explosion ripped through the minibus as it travelled just south of Kandahar, scattering the limbs of victims from the twisted wreckage of the vehicle.

In Nimroz, a spokesman for provincial governor Abdul Karim Barohi said a landmine explosion which killed five soldiers appeared to have been an accident involving a device left over from the country's years of conflict.

Meanwhile in Kandahar, tightened security was deployed around the blast site Saturday with large numbers of police checking vehicles. A police checkpoint was also set up near the huge crater caused by the explosion.

"The mine yesterday was planted on a road where there is no military post, it was planted to kill civilians," said Kandahar provincial security commander General Mohammad Akram Khakraizwal.

The security commander said he believed extremists belonging to the al-Qaeda network and the radical Hezb-i-Islami party of renegade Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar were behind the blast.

He said a ceremony would be held in Kandahar on Monday to mourn the victims, pledging support for their families.

Drivers at the site said the explosion was caused by a landmine planted on the dirt road Thursday night.

"The bus which was hit was the first in the morning to have reached the site," minibus operator Ahmed Zia told AFP.

Residents nearby described the scene of carnage after the explosion in which six goats were also killed.

"We collected hands, feets and other limbs from a radius of around half a kilometre (500 yards)," resident Shah Mahmood said.

Colonel Roger King, a spokesman for the US military, which has a large base near Kandahar, said the explosion may have been caused by a device planted by al-Qaeda or the Taliban.

"I understand there was a bus not too far from Kandahar airfields. It was blown up by something, I am not exactly sure what," he told reporters at the Bagram air base, a US command centre north of Kabul.

He said it may have been a deliberate attempt to cause deaths on a road frequently used by the US military.

The US-led military coalition is engaged in a major offensive less than 100 kilometres (62 miles) from Kandahar to rout fighters from a mountainside warren of caves believed to be a base for extremist operations.

In its largest confrontation since last March, coalition forces killed 18 rebel fighters allegedly linked to Hezb-i-Islami, the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

Friday's explosion occurred as the United Nations special envoy to Afghanistan warned the UN's Security Council that support for the Taliban militia may be growing in parts of the war-devastated country.

"We continue to hear worrying reports that support for the remnants of the Taliban may be growing in some areas of Afghanistan," Lakhdar Brahimi said.

Brahimi added that "the peace process in Afghanistan will need to progress much further before we can safely say that it is irreversible."

---

Mine explosion in southern Afghanistan kills four Afghan soldiers
Sat Feb 1,11:45 AM ET  By NOOR KHAN, Associated Press Writer
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan - A pickup truck carrying Afghan soldiers ran over a land mine in the country's rugged southwest on Saturday, killing four soldiers and wounding five, a local government official said.

The truck had apparently veered off a road into a field in a heavily mined area about 100 kilometers (60 miles) south of Chahar Burjak, the capital of Nimroz province, said Mohammad Sawaz Sudat, spokesman for the provincial government. The area lies in a desert close to the Pakistani border.

Sudat said the mine was Russian in origin and was probably laid during the 1979-89 Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. He said officials believed the explosion was not related to terrorist attacks by remnants of the former Taliban regime and al-Qaida who are active in parts of southern Afghanistan.

"This was an old mine so we've ruled out any link to the Taliban or al-Qaida," Sudat said.

On Friday, a land mine or other device exploded beneath a passenger bus in Kandahar province, some (400 kilometers) 250 miles from the site of Saturday's blast. Local officials have detained seven people for questioning in that attack, which officials said was likely the work of Taliban fugitives or forces loyal to renegade warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

Sudat said the soldiers were on their way to help with opium eradication work when the blast occurred at about 1:30 p.m. (1000 GMT). Afghanistan has been attacking widespread poppy cultivation in hopes of ditching its reputation as the world's prime source of opium and heroin.

Afghanistan is considered the most heavily mined country in the world, a legacy of 23 years of near-continuous warfare, first against Soviet occupiers then between rival Afghan factions struggling for supremacy.

About 200,000 Afghans were killed or wounded by mines over the past two decades. New mine casualties are reported weekly and mine clearance efforts are expected to take decades.

---

How the Taliban destroyed the great Buddhas of Bamiyan
Sunday February 2, 1:09 PM AFP
The operation lasted 25 days in March, 2001, when hundreds of Taliban members from all over Afghanistan worked to destroy the gigantic Buddhas in the Bamiyan valley.

A wonder of the ancient world and a fusion of the ancient cultures of India, Central Asia and the Greece of Alexander the Great, the two splendid statues of Buddha dating from the second or third century were demolished.

The Muslim fundamentalist Taliban deemed them as offensive to Islam.

Almost two years after the event, 40-year-old Mirza Hussein remembers everything "to the smallest detail".

An ex-combatant with the Hazara militia of Hezb-i-Wardat, Hussein was a prisoner of the Taliban at the time, languishing in one of the many caves bored into the sandstone cliffs which sheltered the Buddhas.

"One day, I saw many pick-ups overflowing with Taliban with their heads swathed in black turbans," he said.

"They posted a T-55 tank about three hundred meters in front of largest of the two Buddhas, and they started to ram it, but without any result. The draped skirt of the statue was hardly scratched," he recalled with a wide smile.

"Then they changed their method and brought trucks stuffed with bombs and ammunition of all kinds."

Hussein said he and ten other prisoners were then made under threat of the Taliban's Kalshnikov rifles to unload the munitions and pile them at the foot of the statues.

"There were tons of explosives, the Taliban wanted not only to destroy the Buddhas, but to break down the whole cliff which supported them.

"Started by a detonator hung at the end of a long cable, the explosion was enormous, an ocean of dust and fire hundreds of meters (yards) in diameter," Hussein said raising his hands to the sky.

But when the immense cloud of dust settled, Hussein said, the largest of the Buddhas was still upright, dominating the valley like a challenge to the Taliban.

"Only the lower part of the statue had been destroyed, just its legs, the remainder was intact," he said. "Long consultations between the principal commanders started then, including two mullahs Haji Hadi and Muri Abdullah who came especially from Kandahar.

"They discussed with Pakistani and Saudi technicians who arrived that day in three pick-up trucks," Hussein said. "The foreigners left a few hours later, leaving written instructions."

Learning the lesson from their first failed experiment, the Taliban directed by Mullah Agha Shrin Salangi started working on the smaller Buddha, this time girdling the explosives piled up at the foot of the statue with hundreds of sand bags.

The statue, which had survived the advance of Islam as it had the invading hordes of Genghis Khan in the 13th century, did not resist the explosive shockwave its destruction greeted by joyful shooting and the ritual sacrifice of 50 cows.

"They gathered around a large fire and danced to the throbbing drums of the traditional Attan dance all night," Hussein said.

"The vandals then turned again to the destruction of the great Buddha, but this time proceeded step by step, methodically. Suspended by ropes from the caves above the statue, we drilled holes into the head with a large machine into which we placed dynamite."

Hussein said they then did the same thing to the shoulders, the breast ... at the rate of two or three small explosions per day, and until there was nothing left of the enormous statue but the shadow of the sandstone cliff.

---

Immunization campaign for women launched in Afghanistan
Saturday, February 01, 2003 2:19 AM EST
KABUL, Feb 1, 2003 (Xinhua via COMTEX) A ground-breaking campaign to immunize Afghan women against tetanus was launched here on Saturday as part of the global efforts to eliminate the killer disease which kills about 30,000 women and 200,000 infants every year in the world.

The week-long immunization program, starting from Sunday, will involve about 3,000 health workers and volunteers in helping administer the tetanus toxoid vaccine in four major cities in the country, including Kabul, Kandahar, Jalalabad and Mazar-e-sharif, aiming to reach around 740,000 women, health officials said.

The program, first of its kind in the country, was launched with enthusiastic support of Afghan Transitional President Hamid Karzai, who has appealed to Afghan women to ensure that they receive the vaccination in a repeatedly broadcast televised address in recent days.

The anti-tetanus campaign, conducted by the Afghan Ministry of Public Health and jointly supported by the United Nations Children 's Fund (UNICEF) and the World Health Organization (WHO), is part of a broad immunization effort to cover all the women of child bearing age from 15 to 49 in Afghanistan by the end of 2005.

A recent study by UNICEF showed that almost half of all deaths among Afghan women of child bearing age were a direct result of pregnancy and childbirth, with about 1,600 women dying for every 100,000 live births, one of the highest maternal mortality ratios in the world.

It found that over one-fourth of neonatal deaths in Afghanistan were caused by tetanus.

Neonatal tetanus occurred as a result of unhygienic birth practices, leading to contamination of the umbilical cord with tetanus spores when it was being cut or dressed after delivery, experts said.

---

Afghanistan: Mine clearance continues despite bomb attack
KABUL, 31 January (IRIN) - UN officials say mine-clearance operations will continue despite a bomb blast at a UN building in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e Sharif on 26 January. "We are not suspending our operations and work will continue as normal," Abdul Latif Matin, the operations officer for the UN Mine Action Centre for Afghanistan (MACA), told IRIN in the capital, Kabul, on Friday.
Windows of the MACA building and a nearby residence were shattered. However, there were no injuries as no one was inside the building at the time of the attack.

Speaking at a news conference in Kabul on Thursday, Manoel de Almeida e Silva, spokesman for the UN secretary-general's special representative for Afghanistan, said initial reports indicated that someone walking by might have thrown the device onto the roof. He added that an investigation was under way.

The explosion in Mazar-e Sharif came within hours of an armed attack on a UN convoy in the eastern city of Jalalabad, in which two Afghan security men were killed. The motive for the attack on the UN convoy remain unknown. It has resulted in the UN stepping up security and restricting the movement of its vehicles in Nangarhar, a measure which will affect the distribution of much-needed aid in the region.

"UN road missions to Khogiani, Izerak and Sezar districts have been suspended. This has a direct impact on our humanitarian programmes," Manoel de Almeida e Silva said. "Some 1,000 families due to receive aid as part of the winter response will not receive assistance until this road restriction is lifted," he added.

---

AFGHANISTAN: New institutional environment for drug control
KABUL, 31 January (IRIN) - Afghanistan’s newly established counter narcotics directorate (CND) said it would make the country drug-free within three seasons. "We are working with UN, UK, US and Afghanistan government to finalise a new anti drug strategy," Mirwais Yasini Director General of CND told IRIN in the Afghan capital Kabul on Thursday.

"With consultation of the justice, health, interior and rural rehabilitation ministries a new law on drugs in Afghanistan is underway," Yasini said and maintained that a draft National Drug Control Strategy was elaborated with inputs from concerned ministries and other relevant institutions which would be presented to Cabinet for adoption shortly.

CND was established in October 2002 under the Afghan government National Security Council and has become operational since January 2003 with regional offices in Kandahar, Helamand, Nangarhar, Herat and Badakhshan provinces. According to the UN Office on Drugs Control and Crime Prevention, UNODCCP Afghanistan Opium Survey for 2002, 90 percent of poppy cultivation in the country is concentrated in these areas.

The directorate announced that the government was in the process of drawing up a plan to strengthen rural livelihoods and to alleviate poverty in all provinces of Afghanistan. "We will prioritise the provinces based on drought, famine and other needs," he said noting that the relevant ministries with the support of the National Security Council, the government of UK and UNODC had organised thematic working groups to prepare implementation plans for each drug control sector.

"We are not rewarding anyone for breaching of law," Yasinisaid calling last years cash compensation strategy an ineffctive plan. He said the new strategy would involve cash-for-work programmes to creat a safety net for the rural population. "There would be no cash compensation," he mentioned, adding that the new strategy would focus on sustainable livelihoods like building roads, schools, water dams and electricity generation stations.

He remarked that the poppy eradication programme started very late last year, "Now we are suitably on time to help the farmers for cultivating alternative seeds," he underlined.

CND remarked that based on eradication reports from the governors of the main opium poppy areas, so far there had been 7060 ha reduction in the southern provinces, including Helmand, Kandahar and Oruzgan and 3,200 ha in the eastern province of Nangarhar. "There was 30 percent reduction in poppy cultivation last year," Yasini said emphasising there would be a considerable reduction this year.

The new Afghan counter drugs directorate declared that a comprehensive joint UNODC/CND opium survey was planned for March 2003.

According to UNODCCP, in recent years Afghanistan had been the main source of illicit opium: 70 percent of global illicit opium production in 2000 and up to 90 percent of heroin in European drug markets originated from the country.

---

Pakistani 'al-Qaeda' suspects held in Italy
Friday, 31 January, 2003, 23:23 GMT BBC News
Italian police displayed explosives after the arrests

Italian police have arrested 28 Pakistani terror suspects they say formed "an al-Qaeda terrorist cell" in the southern city of Naples.

The men have been charged with association with international terrorism, illegal possession of explosive material, falsification of documents and receiving stolen goods
 
Italian police statement
 
The men were found with enough explosives to blow up a three-storey building in a routine check for illegal immigrants, officials said.

Maps identifying local US and Nato targets were also seized during the raid.

The suspects were later charged with terrorist offences, but Pakistan dismissed the accusations as baseless.

A statement from the Naples police headquarters hailed the "al-Qaeda" arrests but gave no details of any connection to Osama Bin Laden's network accused of the 11 September attacks on the US and other atrocities around the world.

The statement said: "The men have been arrested and charged with association with international terrorism, illegal possession of explosive material, falsification of documents and receiving stolen goods."

Police made the arrests after a raid in a housing complex in the old part of Naples city centre known to have a strong mafia presence.

They found the Pakistanis living in a group of apartments which had been knocked into one.

Legal aliens?

The authorities say they found 800 grams (28 ounces) of explosives - enough to blow up a three-storey building, according to police.

The suspects are also reported to have had maps - including one of the town of Bagnoli outside the city, which houses Nato's southern headquarters.

Italy's Ansa news agency said targets identified on the maps included the Nato base, the US Consulate in Naples and an American naval base at a nearby airport.

Documents in Arabic found in the raid are being translated.

Pakistani Foreign Ministry spokesman Aziz Ahmed Khan said the charges appeared to be without foundation.

He told the BBC's Urdu Service that initial inquiries suggested four of the arrested men had valid work visas, while the others were in Italy legally and had applied for work permits.

Mr Khan said the Pakistani embassy in Rome had sought consular access to the men to ascertain what had happened.

Frontline
European intelligence agencies are helping the Italian authorities with the investigation.

Italians have arrested many terror suspects in recent months

The BBC's David Willey in Rome says the country is regarded by the US as a front-line target for Islamic terrorist organisations.

Dozens of people have been arrested in Italy in recent months as part of a crackdown on Islamic terror cells operating in the country.

The authorities have been considering increasing security at sensitive sites since five Moroccans suspected of planning terror attacks were arrested near Venice a week ago.

The five men were found to have maps of Nato bases in northern Italy and a plan of central London.

Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi pledged his support for the US war against terrorism during his visit to Washington on Tuesday.