Kabul: Insurgents staged a pre-dawn ambush on a construction camp in Afghanistan’s western Herat province on Saturday, killing 10 people in one of several deadly attacks across the country overnight and in the morning.
Nine construction workers and a policeman were killed when insurgents attacked the camp in Herat’s Karukh district with rocket-propelled grenades and automatic weapons, Deputy Public Works Minister Ahmad Shah Wahid said.
The workers were involved in a 52-kilometre road construction project run by an Afghan-German company and managed by the public works ministry, Wahid said.
The road runs from Herat’s Karukh district to Qala-i Now, the capital of neighbouring Badghis province. Development projects, most of which receive foreign funding, are frequently targeted by insurgents. In another deadly incident today, five members of a family were killed in the Marjah district of southern Helmand province when their mini-van struck a roadside bomb. They included three children, a woman and a man, a statement from the provincial governor’s office said. The statement added that another roadside bomb late on Frtiday killed three women in Helmand’s Sangin district. In Farah province in the west, a suicide bomber detonated his explosive vest inside a private medical clinic, killing three people including a local police commander, a provincial government spokesman said. (AP)