Afghan Police

Authorities in a troubled province south of the Afghan capital said Thursday that four police officers were killed, apparently while trying to escape Taliban custody, and that they may have been among a group of police who disappeared when their district was overrun by insurgents this week. A surviving police officer was being questioned, the officials said. The Taliban had claimed Monday that a group of about 16 police officers in the Khogyani district of Ghazni province had defected to the insurgency, and had actively participated in torching government buildings and vehicles before voluntarily leaving with the militants.

KABUL, Afghanistan - At least two police officers were killed Monday when five gunmen armed with suicide vests and rocket-propelled grenades stormed the headquarters of the Kabul traffic police department, setting off a firefight that lasted more than eight hours, Afghan officials said. It was the second brazen assault in less than a week in the Afghan capital, which has enjoyed a measure of safety compared with other parts of the country in recent years. The national intelligence agency was attacked Wednesday.

Five British soldiers were shot to death in an attack in the volatile south that British officials attributed to a "rogue" Afghan policeman. The shooting Tuesday in the Nad-e-Ali district of Helmand province raised concerns about the possible infiltration of Afghan troops by militants. The province is a center of the Taliban insurgency and was the focus of a major U.S. offensive over the summer. A British Defense Ministry spokesman said the soldiers, three from the Grenadier Guards and two from the Royal Military Police, were part of a team mentoring the Afghan National Police, an assignment that is a key part of the strategy to stabilize Afghanistan.

U.S. soldiers and Afghan police early Saturday swarmed a dense Taliban stronghold of mud-brick homes on the western shoulder of Kandahar, conducting searches and promising aid in a preview of a planned summer campaign to control the insurgent movement's spiritual home. Operation Kokaran was named for the neighborhood where the Taliban have assassinated government officials and built infiltration routes. The U.S. goal is to clear out insurgents, build up local governance and bring in reconstruction projects.

JOINT BASE LEWIS-McCHORD, Wash. - Testimony in the preliminary hearing for U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales wound up Sunday night with a senior Afghan police investigator saying he did not believe Bales could have killed 16 people in two separate villages by himself. Maj. Khudai Dad, chief of criminal techniques for the Afghan police in the province of Kandahar, said he walked the area between three housing compounds hit by a gunman on the night of March 11 and doubted that any single person could have killed so many people in such a wide area in the space of three hours.

Afghan national police checkpoint No. 4, substation 3, is a blighted shell of a building ringed by garbage and shaded by scruffy trees whose leaves are coated with fine gray dust. Here, nine police officers have the task of protecting the Shinghazi Baba neighborhood of southern Kandahar. Sometimes they can't even protect themselves. Two months ago, an officer was fatally shot by an insurgent who escaped on a motorcycle. "The force-protection posture is not really all that great," Sgt. 1st Class Arnaldo Colon, a U.S. Army military policeman, said as he arrived Wednesday morning for an inspection.

Hundreds of insurgents in a convoy of trucks attacked a police headquarters in southeastern Afghanistan, triggering a gun battle that killed 22 people, officials said Sunday. The fierce fighting in Paktika province was the latest incident in a wave of violence that has underscored how unstable Afghanistan remains after U.S.-led forces toppled the Taliban in late 2001.

In one of the deadliest 24-hour spans in recent weeks for American forces, eight U.S. soldiers were killed in three separate attacks in southern Afghanistan late Tuesday and Wednesday, including a coordinated assault on an Afghan elite police headquarters in the southern city of Kandahar. In the first attack, an insurgent rammed his explosives-filled car into the main gate of the Afghan police compound late Tuesday night while other militants opened fire with automatic rifles and rocket launchers, NATO and Afghan authorities said.

Two people were killed and about half a dozen others injured in continuing protests Sunday against an American pastor's plan — suspended two days earlier — to burn copies of the Muslim holy book. Violence stemming from the now-defunct threat by a heretofore little-known pastor, Terry Jones, illustrated the depth of outrage inspired in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Muslim world over his church's declared intent to desecrate the Koran to mark the ninth anniversary of the Sept.

Growing up in Modesto, Benjamin J. Palmer enjoyed playing soprano bugle. So he thought of joining the Marine Corps in hopes of becoming part of its elite drum and bugle corps. Instead, he became a Marine Corps specialist in air command and control and rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel. Palmer was three weeks into a yearlong deployment in Afghanistan and just three days shy of chalking up a quarter-century with the Marines when he was shot and killed May 12 inside an Afghan civil order police compound in Lashkar Gah, the capital of southern Helmand province, on the Pakistani border.