Agence France-Presse,
An Afghan journalist was beheaded and seven NATO troops were killed by roadside bombs at the weekend as Afghanistan's Taliban militia pushed on with their brutal insurgency.
A Taliban spokesman said Sunday that Ajmal Naqshbandi, who was kidnapped last month along with Italian journalist Daniele Mastrogiacomo, was executed because the government failed to meet their demand to free Taliban prisoners.
The killing was later confirmed by an Afghan intelligence official and condemned by Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi as “an absurd crime”. The United States described the beheading as “barbaric”.
La Repubblica correspondent Mastrogiacomo was freed after two weeks in captivity in a controversial exchange for five Taliban prisoners which was widely condemned. His Afghan driver was beheaded before his release.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai had described the prisoner exchange to free Mastrogiacomo as an “extraordinary” situation and said he would not release any more Taliban prisoners to save the Italian's Afghan colleague.
The killing of Naqshbandi has raised new fears about the fate of two French nationals and three Afghan colleagues who were abducted by Taliban militants last week in the southwestern province of Nimroz.
News of the execution came as six Canadian soldiers were killed on Sunday when a suspected Taliban roadside bomb detonated in the southern province of Helmand, where NATO troops are fighting the Islamic militia.
The bombing was the deadliest single attack on NATO forces in the country this year.
The alliance said another NATO soldier was killed in a separate bombing, without giving further details.
The latest casualties brought to 34 the number of foreign troops who have died in Afghanistan since January.
The Taliban militia launched their insurgency months after being ousted from power in Kabul by a US-led coalition in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.
The insurgency intensified last year with Taliban and Al-Qaeda militants using roadside and suicide bombings, tactics copied from insurgents fighting US forces in Iraq.
In another tactic made popular in Iraq, the Taliban have targetted aid workers as well as foreign and local journalists for kidnapping.
The reported execution of Naqshbandi was met with dismay in Afghanistan and in Italy, where his colleague Mastrogiacomo was grief-stricken.
“I am distraught, destroyed. It's a horrible, gratuitous, cowardly homicide,” he told the Italian news agency ANSA.
La Repubblica editor Ezio Mauro said in a statement: “We are in a time of anguish — all of La Repubblica, together with Daniele Mastrogiacomo.”
Following the reported killing, opposition politicians in Italy blamed the Italian government for abandoning the Afghan.
“The execution of Mastrogiacomo's interpreter is a terrible responsibility for the Prodi government. It casts light on the cynicism of Prodi, of (Foreign Minister Massimo) D'Alema and company,” said parliamentarian Isabelle Berolini of Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia.
