Afghanistan's former
ambassador-designate to Pakistan, seized by gunmen two years ago in the Pakistani
city of Peshawar, has been released and is back home safe, the president's
office said Sunday.
The diplomat, Abdul Khaliq Farahi,
was freed in eastern Afghanistan late Saturday in a joint effort by officials
from both countries and has returned to Kabul, where he met Sunday with
President Hamid Karzai, his office said. A brief statement gave no details on
how he was freed.
Also Sunday, insurgents set fire to
a convoy of NATO fuel tankers in eastern Afghanistan, and a series of bomb
blasts in the south killed two NATO service members and two civilians.
Farahi was heading from the Afghan
consulate toward his home in the border city of Peshawar on Sept. 22, 2008,
when gunmen stopped the vehicle and killed his driver.
"Abdul Khaliq Farahi is in good
condition and right now he is in Kabul with his family," Karzai's office
said.
The NATO service members were killed
in separate explosions in southern Afghanistan. The international military
coalition did not provide further details or the nationalities of the dead
service members.
The civilians were killed in an
explosion in the Spin Boldak district of Kandahar province, just east of the
Pakistan border, said district government chief Abdul Ghani. The bomb was
attached to a motorcycle parked in the main market, he said. The blast injured
more than 10 people.
The convoy attack started in the
early morning. A group of gunmen rushed the trucks in Behsud district of
Nangarhar province - the same area on the edge of Jalalabad city where a group
of would-be suicide bombers tried to storm a NATO base on Saturday, said Ahmad
Zia Abdulzai, a spokesman for the provincial government.
The drivers of the trucks quickly
fled and the insurgents set 12 tankers ablaze, said Abdulzai. Firefighters
worked to quell the flames throughout the morning, as police secured the area.
No one was killed in the attack, Abdulzai said.
Insurgents on both sides of the
Afghan-Pakistan border have routinely struck NATO supply convoys - including in
a pair of attacks on Oct. 6 in which 55 fuel tankers were set ablaze in
Pakistan. The alliance says the attacks have not caused supply problems for
troops.
Also in Nangahar province, a bomb
placed in a wheelbarrow exploded in the provincial capital of Jalalabad,
killing one civilian and injuring nine other people, including six children and
two women, the Interior Ministry said.
