KABUL: Taliban forces have arrested a suspected Daesh militant who planned a bomb attack that killed at least 12 worshippers at a Shiite mosque in Afghanistan, police said on Friday.
Daesh claimed the bomb blast that tore through the Seh Dokan mosque during midday prayers in the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif on Thursday.
The attack also wounded 58 people.
Balkh province’s police spokesman Asif Waziri said Abdul Hamid Sangaryar was a key operative of Daesh.
“He was the mastermind of yesterday’s attack on the mosque,” Waziri said. The interior ministry also reported the arrest of Sangaryar, an Afghan national.
“He played a key role in several attacks in the past and had repeatedly managed to escape, but this time we arrested him in a special operation,” Waziri said.
Daesh also claimed a separate bomb attack in another northern city of Kunduz on Thursday that killed four people and wounded 18 people.
The group has taken responsibility for deadly attacks in Afghanistan, often against Shiite targets, even as the number of bombings have fallen since the Taliban seized power in August last year.
Shiite Afghans are mostly from the ethnic Hazara community and make up between 10 and 20 percent of the country’s 38 million people. They have long been the target of the Daesh, who consider them heretics.
Earlier this week, at least six people were killed in twin blasts that hit a boys’ school in a Shiite neighborhood of Kabul.
No group has so far claimed that attack.
Taliban officials insist their forces have defeated Daesh, but analysts say the militant group is a key security challenge.
The Taliban have regularly raided suspected Daesh hideouts, especially in eastern Nangarhar province — a bastion of the Islamic State-Khorasan (IS-K), the local wing of the militant group.
The biggest ideological difference between the two Sunni Islamist groups is that the Taliban sought only an Afghanistan free of foreign forces, whereas Daesh wants an Islamic caliphate stretching from Turkey to Pakistan and beyond.
Taliban arrest Daesh ‘mastermind’ of Afghan mosque attack
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Taliban arrest Daesh ‘mastermind’ of Afghan mosque attack
- Daesh claimed the bomb blast that tore through the Seh Dokan mosque during midday prayers
US immigration agents’ training ‘broken’: whistleblower
- The fatal shooting of two American citizens in Minneapolis in January reignited accusations that agents enforcing Trump’s militarized immigration operation are inexperienced
WASHINGTON: A former US immigration official said Monday that training for federal agents was “deficient, defective and broken,” adding to pressure on President Donald Trump’s sweeping crackdown.
Ryan Schwank resigned this month from his job teaching law at the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) training academy in Glynco, Georgia, after he said he was instructed to teach new recruits to violate the US Constitution.
The fatal shooting of two American citizens in Minneapolis in January reignited accusations that agents enforcing Trump’s militarized immigration operation are inexperienced, undertrained and operating outside law enforcement norms.
The administration scaled back the deployment after the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in broad daylight by officers sparked mass protests and widespread outrage.
Schwank told a forum hosted by congressional Democrats on Monday that he “received secretive orders to teach new cadets to violate the Constitution by entering homes without a judicial warrant.”
“Never in my career had I received such a blatantly unlawful order,” he said.
He said that ICE cut 240 hours from its 584-hour training program, curtailing subjects such as the US Constitution, lawful arrest, fire arms, the use of force and the limits of officers’ authority.
“The legally required training program at the ICE academy is deficient, defective and broken,” he said.
As a consequence, poorly trained, inexperienced armed officers were being sent to places like Minneapolis “with minimal supervision,” he said.
The lawyer’s comments coincide with the release of dozens of pages of internal ICE documents by Senate Democrats that suggest the Trump administration cut corners on training, the New York Times reported.
Schwank said he resigned on February 13 after more than four years working for ICE, and that he felt duty-bound to report inadequacies with the new training program.
