Afghanistan’s Taliban-led government has announced the arrest of several alleged members of a regional branch of Islamic State who are suspected of killing three foreign tourists in Bamiyan in May and involvement in a mid-September attack on compliance officials in Kabul.
Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said on X on September 30 that the unspecified number of suspected Islamic State-Khorasan (IS-K) members includes one Tajik national.
He alleged that the Tajik national had come from neighboring Pakistan to carry out attacks in Afghanistan and said other IS-K fighters are in hiding in the Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provinces of Pakistan with support from certain intelligence agencies. He did not provide evidence.
Islamabad has rejected past accusations that it provides shelter to militants.
Mujahid added that Taliban operations had forced IS-K militants out of Afghanistan, their former base.
The September 12 attack on employees of the High Directorate of Supervision and Prosecution of Decrees and Edicts — which took over duties from the former UN-backed government’s attorney-general’s office — resulted in six deaths and 13 injuries, according to the Taliban.
The Afghan Prosecutors Association said at least 16 prosecutors were killed.
The May 17 attack on a group of tourists at a market in the central Bamiyan Province killed three foreigners and an Afghan, and injured seven others, according to Taliban officials at the time.
An anonymous Taliban source, however, put the number of dead at eight in comments to RFE/RL’s Radio Azadi. Radio Azadi could not confirm that account.
Spain later confirmed that some of its nationals had been “murdered” in the attack, and simultaneous reports cited injured citizens from Australia, Norway, and Lithuania.
Four suspects were said to have been detained at the scene.
Bamiyan has remained a tourist destination despite a previous Taliban leadership’s destruction in 2001 of two massive sixth-century Buddha statues to prosecute the hard-line fundamentalist group’s extreme ban on idolatry.
source : Radio Free Europe