10-year-old Girl Gets Arrested As She Tried To Detonate Suicide Bomb Vest Outside A Police Station
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| Spozhmay with a police woman |
Spozhmay was about to blow herself up and the people around her when Afghan soldiers spotted her and apprehended her just in time as she struggled to operate the detonator.
During interrogation, the young girl, who was in a state of shock and confusion, confessed that her brother, a local Taliban commander, had sent her on the mission.
She was taken to the provincial capital of Lashkar Gah.
In July it emerged that Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan were bribing starving children as young as eight years old to plant deadly roadside booby traps, be decoys in ambushes and even act as suicide bombers.
In 2011 an eight-year-old girl died after she was tricked into carrying a concealed bomb close to a police vehicle, where it was remotely detonated.
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| Neaz |
The boy had been tending his father’s flock of sheep when coalition forces bombed his village.
The Taliban were hiding in our house when a helicopter came and bombed us,’ he said. ‘My father was hit in his heart and his head, he was torn apart. My mother was hit in the chest and died. I have no one.’In the immediate aftermath of the raid, Neaz was kidnapped by Taliban leaders and taken to a nearby town and shown how to use guns and make IEDs.
They plied him with sweets and he was initially delighted when they said they planned to bring him an extra-special gift – a suicide vest packed with bullets and grenades.
Young Neaz said:
They made me try it on. The grenades went all around my body and then they offered me the coins [50 Afghanis – about 60p]. They told me to blow myself up at a checkpoint. I asked what I’d do with the money if I had to blow myself up. But they kept encouraging me, telling me that if I did it I would go to heaven.’He finally escaped and walked nine miles to turn himself in at a police station.
Now aged ten, Neaz lives in an orphanage in Lashkar Gah.
