Former Afghan president killed in Kabul

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2011/09/2011920124955977877.html

A former Afghan president, along with four other people, has been killed in a suicide attack in Kabul, the capital.

Burhanuddin Rabbani, who served as president during the 1990s, was recently the head of the High Peace Council, tasked by Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, to reach out to the Taliban for talks.

Ismail Qasimyar, one of his deputies at the peace council, confirmed to Al Jazeera that Rabbani and four others were killed in the attack.

Reports about the fate of Masoom Stanekzai, the secretary of the council and a long time adviser to Karzai, remained conflicting.

Al Jazeera’s Abdullah Shahood, reporting from Kabul, said Rabbani was meeting with a Taliban delegation at his home when the attack happened.

“I just spoke to one of the High Peace Council members near Rabbani’s home,” said Shahood.

“He said at the meeting with a Taliban delegation, one of the members approached him to try to shake hands and detonated his explosives that he had hidden in his turban.”

The latest in a series of targeted killings, Rabbani’s is the most high-profile political assassination since 2001.

Rabbani was president of the Afghan government that preceded the Taliban, a period remembered for the deadly civil war that left thousands of people dead.

After he was driven from Kabul by the Taliban in 1996, he became the nominal head of the Northern Alliance, which swept to power in the capital after the Taliban’s fall in 2001.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-14985779

The chairman of the Afghan High Peace Council, Burhanuddin Rabbani, has been killed with several other people in a bomb attack in Kabul, officials say.

Mr Rabbani was killed at his home by a suicide attacker who officials believe had concealed a bomb in his turban.

He was meeting members of the Taliban at the time. The council leads Afghan efforts to negotiate with the Taliban.

Mr Rabbani is a former president of Afghanistan and also led the main political opposition in the country.

A senior adviser to the peace council, Masoom Stanakzai, is also thought to have been seriously wounded in the attack.

On hearing the news Afghan President Hamid Karzai decided to cut short his visit to the US but briefly met President Barack Obama, who condemned the killing as a “tragic loss”. Both men reinforced their determination to continue the quest for peace.

President Karzai said: “This is a sad day for us in Afghanistan but a day of unity and day of continuity for our efforts.”

Abdullah Abdullah, the leader of the opposition in the Afghan parliament, said Mr Rabbani’s killing was “a big loss for all the people of Afghanistan”, describing the former president as a man who “strove until his last breath to bring peace”.

Nato and the International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) condemned the attack, with Isaf commander Gen John R Allen saying that “the face of the peace initiative has been attacked”.

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either someone is tidying up lots of loose ends in afghanistan or its a concerted effort to kill anyone close to karzai..which maybe about killing 2 birds with one stone..

401

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~ by seeker401 on September 23, 2011.