Joint US-British raids on Afghanistan continued for the third consecutive day Tuesday, as Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar’s headquarters were hit by missiles without hurting the elusive strongman, Al Jazeera satellite TV reported.
Earlier on Tuesday, four civilians were killed when a US or British cruise missile slammed into a demining agency in the Afghan capital, deminers said Tuesday.
Staff at the Afghan Technical Consultants (ATC) demining agency said four guards were killed and two more wounded when the missile struck at around 9:00pm (1630 GMT) on Monday night.
Shocked staff, neighbors and Taliban soldiers looked emotional as they picked through the rubble of the office, where the crushed and torn remains of one man could be seen squashed between two concrete slabs.
Al Jazeera showed footage of the dead bodies of the deminers, whom the station said were fast asleep at the time, being scavenged out of the rubble.
"This is tyranny. There is no military target here," said an old man. "God curse you America!"
ATC employee Mohammad Shafiq said the group had stopped work after the pullout of foreign deminers along with United Nations international staff in the days following the September 11 attacks in the United States.
The ATC group, one of dozens of agencies working to remove the scourge of landmines which litter the country, is in the eastern Yaka Toot area of Kabul, on a main road leading to the eastern city of Jalalabad.
In the southern city of Kandahar, a Taliban official quoted by the Afghan Islamic Press said one "civilian" died as foreign jets bombed the airport, suburban areas and Maiwand, a town 70 kilometers to the west.
"This bombardment has left one resident dead but we have no other details," he was quoted as saying -- KABUL (AFP)
