The Taliban on Tuesday denied involvement in dispatching a 10-year-old girl to carry out a suicide attack against Afghan police after the girl said her brother wrapped her in an explosives-laden vest but that she refused to blow herself up at a checkpoint in Helmand province.
Taliban spokesman Qari Yousef Ahamdi, on Tuesday denied involvement in the plot, dismissing the news as , as government propaganda.
“We never do this, especially with girls,” he said.
On Monday, Afghanistan’s interior ministry announced her detention of Spozhmai and said she was just 10-years-old.
Spozhmai spoke to the media and said that her brother, named Zahir, told her to approach a checkpoint and ask the deputy commander for a ride with him to neighboring Kunar province.
“I agreed. Then he attached the vest on my body and told me to spend the night here and leave in the morning,” she said.
But, she said she had second thoughts.
“I said I won’t go, then he took off the vest and tried to convince me that they (police) will die and I will remain alive,” Spozhmai said.
She said her brother then fled with the vest.
Police said they believed her account.
“The guy named Zahir had the suicide vest and escaped, but she was still there and when our commander of the battalion heard her voice, they surrounded the area and brought this girl to their base, and we all heard her story on how she was forced into this action,” Colonel Hamidullah Sediqi said.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai condemned the Taliban for using a child in the planned attack.
Although the Taliban deny it, human rights groups say the insurgent group has occasionally dispatched children for suicide bombings. But girls have been used only rarely, according to Heather Barr, Afghanistan senior researcher at Human Rights Watch.
According to Human Rights Watch, an eight-year-old girl was killed in central Uruzgan province in 2011 when a bag of explosives the Taliban instructed her to carry to a police checkpoint detonated.
