A blast in his office wounded the acting governor of a southeastern Afghan province Thursday, a sign of deteriorating security in an area on the Pakistani border where seven CIA employees were killed last week. Tahir Khan Sabri, acting governor of Khost province, was hurt along with seven other people, including police and senior provincial officials, said Muhammad Nawab, a senior Afghan army general in the province. The wounds were not life threatening, but the blast inside the heavily-guarded governor's compound appeared to be a sign of militants' ability to penetrate deeper into areas considered secure by Afghan authorities and their Western backers. Khost, which borders on the remote mountainous Pakistani region of North Waziristan, has been a central front between US forces and militants, especially a Taliban-allied faction led by former anti-Soviet guerrilla chief Jalaluddin Haqqani. Last week in the province a suicide bomber reported to be an Al-Qaeda-linked Jordanian double agent killed seven CIA employees in the deadliest attack against the US intelligence agency in decades. The CIA attack raised concern Haqqani's Pakistan-based Afghan militants could be working more closely with foreign Al-Qaeda operatives to hit Western and Afghan targets. Al-Qaeda's Afghan wing has claimed last week's attack at the US base in Afghanistan, saying the attack was revenge for the deaths of their leaders. The suicide bombing, the second-most deadly attack in CIA history, followed a failed attempt to blow up a Detroit-bound plane on Christmas Day. Former intelligence officials have said Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal Al-Balawi, a doctor, was recruited by Jordanian intelligence to try to infiltrate Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Separately, the Afghan National Department of Security in Kabul said Thursday its members killed five militants in an encounter outside the town of Khost, the provincial capital. In another development, four members of a family were wounded when one of the three rockets fired by the militants hit a residential area to the south of Kabul city overnight, a senior police officer in the Afghan capital said. More than eight years since their ouster by US-backed Afghan troops, the Taliban have made a comeback in recent years, making last year the bloodiest of the war.
