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Afghanistan's Anti-Taliban Leader Masood Confirmed Dead: Report
Ahmed Shah Masood, leader of Afghanistan's anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, has succumbed to the injuries he sustained in a suicide bomb attack last Sunday, Iran's official IRNA news agency reported here Friday.
The IRNA quoted reliable Afghan sources as confirming that Masood had been seriously wounded during the assassination attempt on September 9 and died Friday after a few days of struggling between life and death.
His intelligence chief General Mohammad Fahim has been named as his temporary replacement.
Masood, 49, the chief military obstacle to the hardline Taliban's conquest of all of Afghanistan, had been hit by shrapnel from a bomb detonated by two Arabs posing as journalists.
Earlier on Thursday, a former Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar told the English-language daily Iran News that reports that Masood was still alive following the assassination attempt were false.
"Masood is indeed dead, but his associates and comrades are giving false accounts of his physical state in order to keep up the spirits of the Northern Alliance fighters," he added.
Iran, which shares frontier with Afghanistan, has not recognized the Pakistan-backed Sunni fundamentalist Taliban militia. It supports Afghanistan's moderate opposition Northern Alliance under ousted President Burhanuddin Rabbani, which is still fighting with the Taliban that control some 95 percent of the country.กก
For the reason, Iran has strongly condemned the assassination attempt on Masood and been concerned about his fate after the event.
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