High-profile assassination: Turban bomber kills Afghanistan’s top peacemaker

Such sweet irony.

FROM TRIBUNE.COM.PK:

High-profile assassination: Turban bomber kills Afghanistan’s top peacemaker

By Naveed Hussain / Tahir Khan
Published: September 20, 2011

KABUL/KARACHI/ISLAMABAD:

Former Afghan president Burhanuddin Rabbani was assassinated in his home in Kabul on Tuesday by a Taliban insurgent who set off explosives concealed in his turban, wounding a key presidential adviser and dealing a body blow to Kabul’s reconciliation process with the Taliban.

Rabbani was heading the 68-member High Peace Council set up in October 2010 to build contacts with the Taliban.

His death is the most high-profile murder since the 2001 US-led invasion ousted the Taliban from power and comes just two months after Karzai’s brother Ahmed Wali Karzai was also killed.

It also comes just a week after a 20-hour siege by the Taliban at US embassy and Nato headquarters in the supposedly secure zone of Kabul.

The attackers arrived at Rabbani’s house in the Wazir Akbar Khan neighbourhood with Mohammad Massom Stanikzai, a top adviser of President Hamid Karzai and Rabbani’s deputy, for a meeting before the turban bomber detonated his explosives.

A member of the High Peace Council, Fazel Karim Aymaq, told The Express Tribune the men had come with “special messages” from the Taliban and were “very trusted.”

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