Afghan police, US air strikes kill 32 Taleban

Hundreds of Afghan police, backed by US air strikes, retook control of a district capital that was overrun by the Taleban last week, killing 32 fleeing guerrillas and capturing at least 15, police said. The Taleban insurgents took Mian Nishin district of Kandahar province last week, capturing 30 police officers and a district chief in an embarrassment to the provincial government.
They executed eight policemen, including the district police chief, before announcing the release of the remaining 23 people.
Before dawn on Tuesday, about 400 police officers advanced on the district capital and the guerrillas fled, said Salim Khan, the deputy provincial police chief.
"We chased the Taleban to an area 10km north," he told Reuters. "We found them in a village called Murghai and as a result of the clashes there, 11 Taleban were killed and 15 suspects were arrested." Khan said the 11 were killed by the police, while another 21 who had taken refuge in a nearby village, were killed by the US air strikes to support the operation. He gave no details on whether there were government casualties.
A spokesman for the US military said he had no immediate information on the operation.
The guerrilla casualties come after US military air strikes killed 15 to 20 militants on Sunday in Helmand province.
Mian Nishin is in the north of Kandahar province, about 400km south-west of Kabul and was the scene of operations by Afghan and US-led forces last week in which government officials said nine guerrillas were killed.
In a separate incident in Kandahar, an Afghan employed by the joint Afghan-UN election body was shot dead in an attack on his car on Tuesday, UN and Afghan officials said.
Several guerrillas opened fire with assault rifles on the workers' car in the village of Malang Karez in Kandahar's Maiwand district, district chief Khan Agha told Reuters, adding that the man killed was the driver of the car.
The man killed was an employee of the UN-Afghan Joint Electoral Management Body (JEMB), which is organising parliamentary elections due on September 18, said Abdul Qahir Wasifi, a senior JEMB official in Kandahar. The brother of a JEMB worker was wounded, he said.