In an incident police are calling a “mistake” and top officials in the Interior Minister are promising to investigate, Baghlan Province Senator Mohammed Younus was killed this morning in a hail of police gunfire.
According to police spokesmen they had killed several militants in the area and were told the militants were going to take revenge, so they set up multiple “ambushes” in the area.
It isn’t hard to guess what happened from here. Taliban have repeatedly set up their own roadblocks as a means of capturing members of the US-backed government in the past, and the hastily assembled “checkpoints” were no doubt immediately suspicious to Senator Younus, as his car drove down a remote highway at 2:30 AM. When they drove past, police gunned them down.
The Senator, who also went by the name “Dear Sir,” was a former militant himself, fighting against the Soviet invasion forces in the 1980s. His death will prove yet another embarrassment to the Afghan government, which did not appear to net a single Taliban with their “ambush” but instead killed one of their own parliamentarians.