Two held in Afghanistan over killing of Indian writer

[Ash]

KHOST, Afghanistan (Reuters) - Afghan police have detained two insurgents suspected of killing an Indian author who they accused of spying, a provincial police chief said on Tuesday.

Sushmita Banerjee, whose story was told in the movie "Escape from Taliban", was pulled from her home by gunmen in the eastern province of Paktika on Wednesday last week and shot dead.

Paktika provincial police chief Dawlat Khan Zadran said two insurgents were detained while planting a roadside bomb and their features matched the description of the killers given by Banerjee's Afghan husband.

"During the interrogation, one of them confessed to killing the Indian author but said he had other accomplices," Zadran told Reuters.

"They said they killed her because she defamed the Taliban in her writing and set up an internet connection in her home to spy for India," Zadran added.

The Afghan Taliban denied involvement but Zadran said the two detained men identified themselves as members of a militant faction allied with the Taliban called the Haqqani network.

The Haqqanis, an ethnic Pashtun group with strongholds in southeastern Afghanistan and across the border in Pakistan, are seen by the government and Western force as the most experienced militant fighters in Afghanistan.

They have been held responsible for some of the most serious attacks in the capital, Kabul, and elsewhere.

Banerjee, who was 49 and from Kolkata, moved to Afghanistan in 1989 after marrying Afghan businessman Jaanbaz Khan. She converted to Islam and changed her name to Sayed Kamala.

She opened a dispensary providing medicine, but her life changed dramatically in 1993, when the Taliban emerged in southern Afghanistan after years of war.

Branded a woman of poor morals, she was forced to close her dispensary and whipped for refusing to wear a burqa, she said in a book she wrote.

She fled to Pakistan but was brought back by her husband's family and kept under house arrest. According to her book, she escaped in 1994 by tunnelling a hole through a mud wall.

She fled but was quickly detained near Kabul. Despite threats of execution, she convinced the Taliban to send her to the Indian embassy from where she was repatriated to India.

She was making a documentary about the lives of women in Paktika when she was killed.

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[Himanshu Pandey]

internet connection to spy for India?

 

[Tshering22]

After all that ordeal, who the heck asked her to go back?

Very sad.

 

[pmaitra]

After all that ordeal, who the heck asked her to go back?

Very sad.

As Sun Tzu said, the stupid have no fear of life. Susmita Bannerjee was brave to go back, no doubt, but was utterly stupid, and stubborn.

 

[ladder]

Finger at Pakistan rebels in murder - Haqqani group killed Susmita: Kabul

New Delhi, Sept. 10: Militants from the Pakistan-backed Haqqani terror network killed Susmita Banerjee last Wednesday, Afghanistan has told India in conclusions that threaten to turn the Calcutta author's murder into the latest diplomatic flashpoint between New Delhi and Islamabad.

Police in southeast Afghanistan's Paktika province where Susmita was killed had initially suspected a Taliban hand. But yesterday, they arrested two men belonging to the Haqqani network who have confessed to the murder, Afghan officials have told Indian ambassador Amar Sinha.

New Delhi blames the Haqqani network for multiple attacks on Indian interests in Afghanistan, including the two strikes on its Kabul embassy that killed over 70 people.

"We are verifying on our own what we have been told by Afghanistan," a senior diplomat here told The Telegraph. "If it's true, that establishes a Pakistan link that we simply cannot ignore."

Susmita, whose memoirs of her marital life in Afghanistan from 1988 till 1995 and subsequent escape from the Taliban had inspired a Bollywood film, had returned last January to Afghanistan after 17 years in Calcutta.

She had resumed work as an untrained medical worker on the outskirts of Paktika's capital Sharana, where she lived with her Afghan husband Jaanbaaz Khan and his extended family. Susmita had met Jaanbaaz in 1986 in Calcutta, where he worked as a moneylender.

The arrested men have indicated during interrogation that they killed Susmita on orders from the Haqqani network's provincial commanders, Paktika governor Mohibullah Samim and the province's police chief, Dawlat Khan Zadran, told the Indian mission in Kabul today.

Susmita was killed apparently because of the portrayal of Taliban brutality in her 1998 book Kabuliwalar Bangali Bou (A Kabuliwala's Bengali wife).

Zadran said the accused had also hinted that Susmita's Indian identity added to her target value for the Haqqanis, who are closely affiliated to the Taliban and, according to some intelligence agencies, to al Qaida.

Islamabad, whom New Delhi accuses of sponsoring the Haqqanis, has frequently charged India's missions in Kandahar and Jalalabad — the big city closest to Sharana — with fomenting separatist movements in Pakistan's troubled southwestern province of Baluchistan.

As the only Indian in the region — most other Indians in Afghanistan are in the cities or are working on infrastructure projects — Susmita may have sparked suspicion, Zadran has told Indian officials.

For India, establishing whether Susmita's murder was ordered locally by militant commanders or had the blessings of officials in Pakistan is critical at a time it is trying to re-engage with Islamabad after recent border tensions.

India has accused the Haqqanis in the past of kidnapping its engineers working on infrastructure projects in Afghanistan. India, the US and Afghanistan all concluded that the Haqqanis were responsible for the 2008 and 2009 terror attacks on India's embassy in Kabul.

New Delhi believes these attacks are part of Pakistan's strategy to reassert its influence in Afghanistan once US-led forces withdraw from the country next year.

"We are in touch with the police chief (Zadran) who has told us he is trying his best to get to the bottom of this crime at the earliest," external affairs ministry spokesperson and joint secretary Syed Akbaruddin said.

He added that the ministry had spoken to the Bengal government over its demand that Susmita's remains be returned to India. This, Akbaruddin said, is not possible because her husband has already buried her and, as her next of kin, has the legal right to decide on her remains.

Finger at Pakistan rebels in murder

 

[Compersion]

This was done nearby the time the Afghanistan president announced 1 seat in parliament for Hindus and Sikhs in lower house...