PESHAWAR: Nato aircraft could hit even a funeral as it happened recently in Khogiani district in Nangarhar province in eastern Afghanistan when a vehicle carrying a coffin and the dead man’s relatives was bombed and 11 civilians including women and children were killed.
The incident happened in Hashimkhel Khwar area on August 5. The sad and surprising aspect of the bombing was that it happened five kilometres away from the site of an earlier battle that day between Taliban fighters and foreign forces in Kooz Koruna locality of Nakurkhel village. In that clash, the NATO jetfighters had also bombed the area killing 13 persons. The NATO authorities claimed all 13 were Taliban, but this was not true as among them were 12 and 13-year-old youngsters and every villager vouchsafed that they were not Taliban fighters.
For some inexplicable reason, the NATO warplanes then bombed this vehicle carrying the dead man and his relatives for funeral and stranded in Hashimkhel Khwar due to flash floods. Hashimkhel Khwar is at a distance of five kilometres from Nakurkhel village where the battle between foreign forces and Taliban fighters had taken place.
According to Muhammad Yaqoub Sharafat, a senior Afghan journalist who runs the Afghan Islamic Press and belongs to the bombed village in Khogiani district, there were no signs of battle in Hashimkhel Khwar and no evidence of presence of armed men there and even then the vehicle was bombed and civilians were killed. Through his sources, he found out that there was no justification for this bombing raid by US-led Nato forces that took the lives of 11 innocent Afghans. http://www.thenews.com.pk/top_story_detail.asp?Id=30614

2 . Suicide attack kills four Afghan policemen
HERAT: A suicide attacker struck a police convoy in the western Afghan city of Herat on Sunday killing four policemen, while a second bomb blast hit a police convoy in southern Kandahar, officials said.
The suicide car bomb hit on the road to Herat’s airport, said deputy provincial police chief Delawar Shah Delawar.
“Four policemen were martyred and another officer was wounded,” said Ziaudin Mahmmodi, deputy police chief for western Afghanistan. He said a female police officer was among the dead. Eyewitnesses said that the bomber drove his explosives-laden car into the police convoy. Two fuel tankers were alight at the scene, along with a damaged police pick-up truck.
In Kandahar city, explosives fixed to a parked motorcycle detonated as a prison police convoy passed, injuring one policeman, said Fazel Ahmad Shairzad, deputy provincial police chief. www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=201089story_9-8-2010_pg7_4