Afghan official: Child killed in Jalalabad blast

[January 13, 2011]  KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) -- A bomb in a marketplace in eastern Afghanistan killed a child on Thursday in part of the persistent violence across the country despite crackdowns on insurgent leaders, an official said.

Ahmad Zia Abdulzai, a spokesman for Nangarhar province, said the blast occurred outside a music cassette shop in Jalalabad, the provincial capital 125 kilometers (77 miles) east of Kabul. Other civilians were injured, but were not taken to the hospital, he said.

Separately, NATO reported that Afghan and coalition forces on Wednesday detained a Taliban operator in Behsud district of the same province, one of scores of insurgents who have been captured or killed in recent months in southern and eastern Afghanistan, especially along the Pakistan border.

The coalition said the Taliban operator coordinated the movement of foreign fighters into eastern Kunar province from neighboring Pakistan and was responsible for conducting attacks against government and coalition forces.

In the Afghan capital, a few hundred protesters marched to the Iranian Embassy to demonstrate against the hanging of Afghans in Iran.

Afghan lawmakers have claimed that as many as 45 Afghans had been executed in Iran, but the Afghan Ministry of Foreign Affairs has said that number is exaggerated. The ministry, which has raised the issue with Iranian officials in Tehran, has confirmed the execution of six Afghans in Iran but has not provided details about why they were killed.

The protesters carried large photographs of Iranian officials, their faces crossed out with red Xs.

"The Iranian regime has been doing very brutal acts against Afghan people," said Razia, a female protester who uses only one name. "These were all people who were not criminals or traitors. They went to Iran to find work, but they have been killed in a very brutal way."

Last week, a couple hundred Afghans also demonstrated outside the Iranian Embassy to protest Iran's blocking of fuel trucks at the border, which caused domestic fuel prices to rise as much as 70 percent. Afghanistan has no refineries of its own and relies entirely on imported fuel. Iran supplies about 30 percent of the country's refined fuel with the remainder coming from Iraq and Turkmenistan.

Farid Shirzai, head of the Afghan Commerce Ministry's fuel department, said Thursday that Iran currently was allowing 1,000 tons of fuel to enter Afghanistan at three border crossings each day, compared with 3,000 to 4,000 tons daily before the trucks were blocked.

[Associated Press]

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