Afghanistan: Kunduz Governor Among 12 Killed in Mosque Bombing (Rubin)

Alissa Rubin reports for The New York Times:

In an audacious attack, insurgents assassinated the governor of Kunduz Province on Friday by bombing the mosque where he attended the weekly Friday Prayer, according to Afghan officials.

The bomb blast killed 12 people and wounded 33 at the main mosque in Taliqan, the capital of Takhar Province, which borders Kunduz.

[AFP puts the death toll at 20.]

The slain governor was Muhammad Omar, a Takhar native who returned there regularly for the Muslim weekend and Friday worship. Mr. Omar, who had survived one other assassination attempt, was believed to have been the target of the attack, said Faiz Muhammad Tawhidi, the spokesman for the Takhar governor.

The assassination underscored the growing capability of the insurgency in northern Afghanistan, which has become increasingly unstable over the past year. Mr. Omar was the third government official in the past two months to be assassinated in the region. In August and September, district governors were killed in Kunduz and Baghlan Provinces.

The president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, strongly condemned the attack, saying in a statement that detonating a bomb in a mosque was “a crime against Islam and humanity.”

Assassinations of governors and senior government officials are relatively rare in Afghanistan, though there has been a stream of attacks on influential people in Kandahar Province in the country’s restive south.

The most recent of those occurred Friday when a member of the clerical council of Kandahar, Maulawi Muhammad, was assassinated during Friday Prayer by three masked gunmen who entered the mosque and shot him at close range, said the council’s chief cleric, Hikmatullah Hikmat.

The attack on the Kunduz governor in Takhar, an overwhelmingly Tajik area that has had few problems, shocked residents, among them those gathered around Mr. Omar’s family home in Taliqan to mourn.

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