Kandahar mayor killed by suicide bomb

Hamidi's death comes two weeks after the assassination of Afghan president Hamid Karzai's brother in the same city. Photograph: Ahmad Nadeem/Reuters

The mayor of Afghanistan's southern Kandahar city was killed in a suicide bomb attack on Wednesday, officials said.

The incident occurred just two weeks after the controversial and powerful brother of Afghan president Hamid Karzai was assassinated in the same city.

Mayor Ghulam Haider Hamidi was killed when a suicide bomber detonated his explosives in a corridor near his office, said Zalmay Ayoubi, the spokesman for the Kandahar provincial governor.

"It appears the bomber was carrying the bomb in his turban," Ayobi added.

Kandahar police chief Abdul Razaq said the mayor was meeting some elders from a district of Kandahar city when one of them got close to the mayor and detonated a bomb hidden in his turban.

Hamidi's death comes at a time when there is a dangerous power vacuum in volatile Kandahar province, the Taliban's birthplace and a focus of recent efforts by a surge of US troops to turn the tide against the insurgency.

Karzai's brother, Ahmad Wali Karzai, one of the most powerful and controversial men in southern Afghanistan, was assassinated by a trusted family security guard at his home in Kandahar city on 12 July.

At a funeral service for Ahmad Wali Karzai, a suicide attacker who appeared to have concealed his explosives inside a turban killed a senior cleric and at least four other people in Kandahar.

Kandahar was the site of more than half of all targeted killings in Afghanistan between April and June, a UN report found.

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