Eurasia Press & News
A suicide bomber has killed six police and an Indian engineer in southeastern Afghanistan, a provincial official says.
The Indian Foreign Ministry, however, said two Indian security guards were killed and made no mention of the engineer.
The bomber attacked a convoy carrying a group of Indian road engineers in a district of Nimroz province, Governor Ghulam Dastagir Azad told Reuters.
“In this attack, six Afghan police and an Indian engineer have been killed,” he said.
Eleven Afghan police and two Indian engineers were wounded in the incident, he said, adding the attack was the work of “terrorists”, a term often used by Afghan officials to describe Taliban insurgents.
A statement from the Indian Foreign Ministry said two Indian security guards were killed and several others injured in the attack on a convoy of India’s state-run Border Roads Organisation.
“The government of India strongly condemns this act of terrorism aimed against its aid and humanitarian program in Afghanistan and reiterates its determination to continue to work for the rehabilitation and reconstruction of Afghanistan and the well-being of Afghan people,” it said.
New Delhi would work with Kabul to strengthen security at project sites and at other places were Indians are working to reconstruct the war-torn country, it said, adding a team to review security would be visiting Afghanistan soon.
Ousted from power in 2001, the Taliban have turned to suicide attacks against the Afghan government, aid workers and foreign troops led by NATO and the US military.
Hundreds of people, including many civilians, have been killed in such raids.
India and Afghanistan share close ties and New Delhi is involved in reconstruction projects worth hundreds of millions of dollars there.
But Indians working in the troubled country have been targeted by the Taliban in the past, with two of them taken hostage and found killed since 2005.
