VOA News
Ayaz Gul
January 26, 2016
ISLAMABAD—Officials in Afghanistan say a policeman suspected to have links to the Taliban killed 10 fellow officers Tuesday in the central province of Uruzgan.
The pre-dawn violence happened at a security post in the Chinarto district. The rogue policeman drugged his colleagues before shooting them dead, said a spokesman for the provincial governor.
He added that an Afghan policeman, believed to be the attacker, has been missing from the post along with a vehicle, and weapons and other equipment from the slain officers.
But a Taliban spokesman, Qari Yusuf Ahmadi, in a statement offered a different account of the incident. He said insurgents attacked and captured the security outpost by killing all the policemen deployed there.
Independent verification of the Taliban claims was immediately not available.
The insider attack from within the Afghan police in Uruzgan was the second such incident in the last two weeks.
Provincial officials reported on January 17 that four police officers, suspected collaborators with the Taliban, killed nine colleagues before defecting to the insurgency with all their weapons and ammunition.
Other incident
In another development, Afghan security officials have confirmed to VOA that Taliban insurgents staged an overnight assault in and around the Chinarto district and fighting was still raging on Tuesday.
Insider attacks by Afghan partners had become a major security challenge to the US-led NATO forces while they were conducting joint combat missions in Afghanistan between 2007 and 2013.
The Taliban has expanded its insurgent activities across Afghanistan over the past year, taking advantage of the withdrawal of NATO’s combat troops from the country in late 2014, and has inflicted heavy casualties on Afghan security forces.