MEHTAR LAM: A suicide car bomber struck a funeral in eastern Afghanistan on Wednesday, and a police source said senior officials were among the dead and wounded. A spokesman for the governor of Laghman province, where the attack took place, said there were casualties in the blast but he was not able to confirm whether officials were among them. The police source, who declined to be identified, said the deputy head of Afghanistan's National Directorate of Security Intelligence agency, Abdullah Laghmani, had been killed by the bomb, at a funeral in the provincial capital Mehtar Lam. Laghman governor Lutfullah Mashal was also wounded in the blast, the police source said. A witness in the provincial capital saw a pick-up truck carrying wounded people covered in blood.
BAGHDAD: Nearly 500 U.S. Army combat engineers who specialize in clearing roads of explosives started shifting to southern Afghanistan."We are probably going to be the beginning of the influx you are going to see to Afghanistan," Lt. Col. Kevin Landers, commander of the Fort Carson, Colo.-based 4th Engineer Battalion, said as crews packed crates and cleaned vehicles for the flight to Kandahar.Obama has ordered 17,000 more U.S. soldiers and Marines to Afghanistan to bolster the 38,000 American troops already battling the resurgent Taliban."We are going to take this footprint out of Iraq," said Landers, whose battalion received word of its reassignment last month just after taking command of clearing roads in Baghdad of bombs and debris.
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