Kabul, May 1: One of the BBC’s reporters in Afghanistan Ahmad Shah, has been killed in an attack in the eastern Khost province, the international broadcaster said. He was shot dead on the same day a co-ordinated double suicide bombing in the capital, Kabul, killed 25 people, including at least nine other journalists.
Ahmad Shah, 29, had worked for the BBC’s Afghan service for more than a year and “had already established himself as a highly capable journalist who was a respected and popular member of the team”.
BBC World Service Director Jamie Angus called it a “devastating loss” and sent his “sincere condolences to Ahmad Shah’s friends and family and the whole BBC Afghan team”.
Talib Mangal, spokesman for the provincial governor in Khost, said Mr Shah was shot dead, without providing further details.
The suicide bombing attack, claimed by the Islamic State group, was the deadliest to target journalists since the fall of the Taliban in 2001.
A few hours later another suicide car bombing in Kandahar killed 11 children, police in the southern province said.
Agence France-Presse reported that the news agency’s chief photographer in Kabul, Shah Marai, was among those killed in Kabul.
AFP said Marai died in the second blast which targeted a group of journalists who had rushed to the scene of the earlier suicide attack in the capital.
Sediqullah Tawhidi, an official from the committee, said a cameraman form the local Tolo TV also was among those killed.
Police spokesman Hashmat Stanekzai said the first suicide bomber in Kabul was on a motorbike while the second attacker was among the crowd of reporters who rushed to the scene of the first attack, pretending to be one of the media.
He added that the second attacker then detonated his explosives while still among the reporters.
The second was meant to hit those rushing to the scene of the attack to help the victims of the first blast.
In the Kandahar attack, an official said a suicide bomber targeted a Nato convoy in the district of Daman but killed 11 children from a religious school near the site of the blast.
General John Nicholson, commander of Nato’s Resolute Support mission, said “our thoughts and prayers are with those wounded, and with the innocent Afghans whose lives were needlessly taken from them by the enemies of Afghanistan.”
General Nicholson said that “if the enemies of Afghanistan think their cowardly actions will deter the commitment of the brave Afghan forces and our Resolute Support advisers, or the call by the Afghan people for peace, they are sorely mistaken”.
The children from the madrasa had gathered around the convoy when the bomber struck, one witness said.
