The US and indigenous opposition to Afghanistan's Taliban regime took a severe blow yesterday when a respected former guerilla leader, Mr Abdul Haq, was arrested and executed in Kabul for allegedly spying for the US.
The Taliban's Bakhtar news agency reported that Mr Haq, a key figure in efforts to build a broad-based post-Taliban coalition, who made his name fighting the Russians, was held on Thursday following a firefight in a village near Kabul. Mr Haq had gone to Afghanistan with peace proposals on behalf of former king Mohammad Zaher Shah.
A bad day for the US campaign was compounded by reports of further civilian casualties. During late-night bombing on Thursday, three children were killed - two from one family living in the northwest area of Kabul and a third from the east part of town, officials at the Wazir Akbar Khan Hospital said. Yesterday US bombers also accidentally destroyed three International Red Cross food warehouses.
The death of Mr Haq will exacerbate the problems faced by the US in trying to split the Taliban. The Washington Post yesterday reported a senior Pakistani intelligence official as claiming weak US contacts have hamstrung efforts to encourage defections.
Meanwhile, the infection of a mail sorter in a State Department facility and findings of contamination in a CIA sorting office in Langley, Virginia, the Supreme Court's mail facility, and at a military post office at Silver Springs in Maryland, have led to fears that contaminated letters are still unaccounted for. There were also reports that a local employee at a foreign bank in the Pakistani city of Karachi had contracted anthrax.
