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KANDAHAR, Afghanistan: Unidentified gunmen shot dead a member of parliament in troubled southern Afghanistan while 10 Taliban were killed laying a landmine, Afghan officials told AFP on Saturday.
Legislator Habibullah Jan was shot dead by unknown gunmen while driving in his troubled home district of Zharai in Kandahar province late Friday, district government Niaz Mohammad Sarhadi said.
The legislator, aged around 55, was ambushed soon after leaving the home of one of his wives, residents said.
Jan was also the head of Kandahar's prominent Alizai tribe and a former commander of the 1979-1989 anti-Soviet resistance.
The interior ministry said it was investigating who was behind the assassination.
A spokesman for the Taliban insurgent movement, which is active in Zharai and has carried out several targeted killings, said the movement was not involved in the shooting.
"This is not our work," spokesman Yousuf Ahmadi told AFP by telephone.
The Islamic militants have fought some major battles in Zharai with Afghan and Canadian troops deployed under a NATO-led mission in the past two years.
Jan was the 10th MP to be killed since Afghanistan's first democratically chosen parliament was elected in 2005.
In the worst incidents, six MPs were among nearly 100 killed in a suicide bomb explosion in the northern province of Baghlan in November last year.
Another lawmaker was killed when Taliban gunmen opened fire on President Hamid Karzai at a televised military parade in April. Karzai escaped the attack unhurt.
Afghanistan is wracked by an insurgency being waged by Taliban who swept into power in 1996 and were removed in a US-led invasion in late 2001 for not handing over Al-Qaeda leaders sheltering in the country.
The Islamic militants, said to be helped by Osama Bin Laden's Al-Qaeda terror network, have been targeting military forces, government officials and anyone linked to them, including aid workers.
Police in the southern province of Helmand said 10 rebels were killed late Friday when a mine exploded as they were trying to plant it in a road.
The militants were trying to lay the device near the town of Musa Qala which was a key Taliban base for 10 months until December last year when Afghan and NATO-led forces routed the rebels in a days-long operation.
"Ten Taliban including one of their commanders, named Mullah Jabar, were killed when a mine they were burying on a road exploded," Helmand province police chief Mohammad Hussein Andiwal told AFP.
Their bodies were recovered by security forces, he said.
The rebels in particular use home-made bombs to target Afghan forces and the 70,000 international troops based here to help defeat the insurgency.
Most of the 117 international soldiers killed in Afghanistan this year have died in such explosions, according to an AFP tally.
-AFP/jk
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