Sat, Apr 09, 2005:
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (Reuters) - Ousted Taliban remnants have killed a senior Afghan provincial official several days after kidnapping him, a Taliban spokesman said on Saturday.
Sarajuddin, chief of Zabul's power and water department, was killed after a group of Taliban seized him two days ago outside the town of Qalat, Zabul's provincial capital, the spokesman said.
The murder was confirmed by a local police official.
His killing is the third such murder of a local official in less than a week in the restive south, the former bastion of the Taliban.
Taliban guerrillas fatally wounded General Geranai, former deputy head of the army corps for the south in neighboring Kandahar province on Thursday, a day after killing a security official of adjacent Helmand province.
The number of attacks by the radical Islamists fell over the winter after they failed to make good on a vow to derail landmark presidential elections in October.
But with the onset of spring, low-scale violence linked to Taliban rebels has broken out in several southern and eastern areas of the country.
The rebels killed five Afghan policemen in a firefight in Zabul province on Thursday.
Last update - 17:34 - 09/04/2005
By Arnon Regular, Haaretz Correspondents and News Agencies
Israel Defense Forces soldiers shot dead two Palestinian youths in the Gaza Strip Saturday.
The two boys, 14, were identified as Mussa and Khaled Ghanam. An additional Palestinian youth was seriously wounded in the incident near the Tel a-Sultan neighborhood of Rafah, near the border with Egypt.
According to Palestinian sources, a group of youths was playing on the outskirts of the Rafah refugee camp, several hundred meters from the frontier. IDF forces opened fire on them from the south. The injured youth underwent surgery at a Rafah hospital.
Three men had approached a buffer zone near Israel's border with southern Gaza in the Rafah refugee camp. Troops fired at them after they failed to heed warning shots, a military source said.
A rise in violent incidents has been registered recently in the Gaza Strip. A Qassam rocket landed in the Negev town of Sderot several days ago, and a mortar shell landed in a Gaza settlement.
No Palestinians or Israelis were killed in the Strip during the month of March. In the West Bank, one Palestinian, 25-year-old Islamic Jihad activists Abd al-Latif Abu Khalil was killed.
