Trying to help rebuild and paying with his life for doing so.
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One Pakistani engineer was shot dead and another was missing on Monday, after gunmen attacked their vehicle in eastern Afghanistan.
The engineers were ambushed while traveling on the country’s main Kabul-Kandahar highway near Muqur in Ghazni province, said Fatima Kazmi, executive director of Bahar, a Pakistani construction firm. The dead man was identified as Anwar Shah, 38.
Security staff protecting workers along the road later found the vehicle, its windows shattered by gun-fire, and two other Pakistanis. One engineer was missing, she said.
The car was unmarked, and it was unclear who had carried out the attack.
Workers on the road, a prestige reconstruction project mainly funded by the United States, have been the target of a series of attacks and abductions by suspected Taliban resistance fighters.
PESHAWAR: A senior Taliban spokesman has denied the reports that their fighters were involved in the murder of a Pakistani engineer in Ghazni province on Monday.
“It is untrue. Why would we kill an engineer from a brotherly Muslim country who was in Afghanistan to serve our long-suffering people?” asked Hamid Agha, the official spokesman of the Taliban.
Speaking on phone from an undisclosed location, Agha told The News that Mulla Momin Sabir, who had earlier claimed that the Taliban were behind Pakistani engineer Anwar Shah’s murder, had no authority to speak on behalf of the Taliban. “Mulla Sabir was never part of the Taliban,” he said.
Agha said the Taliban were saddened by the death of the Pakistani engineer because he was a Muslim and had committed no crime. He reminded that the Taliban recently freed the Turkish engineer, Hasan Onal, despite the fact that Turkey had sent troops to Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, Afghan government officials were quoted as saying that the Pakistan engineer was shot dead because he failed to stop his vehicle at a security checkpoint on the road. Agha also denied a Newsweek story that claimed Osama bin Laden’s two Arab envoys recently met three Taliban commanders in Khost to inform them of al-Qaeda plans to shift its fighters from Afghanistan to Iraq.