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Saleh says another key suspect in Kabul University attack arrested
Afghanistan’s First Vice President, Amrullah Saleh, said on Wednesday that they have arrested another suspect behind the deadly attack on Kabul University early this month.
According to Saleh the person, named Rahmatullah, has been taken into custody and is believed to have been one of the masterminds behind the attack that killed at least 22 people, mostly students.
The university attack came just a week after a previous bombing outside another education facility in Kabul that killed 24 students.
In both instances ISIS (Daesh) claimed responsibility.
On Wednesday, Saleh said: “Kabul University and Kosar Danish cases are a crime against humanity and we bring together Afghans and the world against the crime. We hope that the human rights commission ignores criticisms and works practically.”
Saleh’s remarks came after the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) stated that “students and educators must be ensured safety and security while attending school, without any threat or fear for their lives and to be able to work, study, and learn in a protected and safe environment.”
Professors, lecturers and students from universities around the world also weighed in this week and signed and sent out a letter condemning attacks on educational facilities in Afghanistan and listed their demands.
Signatories were from academics at top universities, including Stanford and University of California.
They demanded that the Afghan government, the United States, the European Union, and other international stakeholders use their influence to investigate and prosecute the perpetrators of these “calculated attacks on civilian populations and protected sites, such as universities and educational centres.”
They also called for the rights of students and educators to be safeguarded and hold all actors engaged in the war in Afghanistan accountable and pressure them to comply with the Geneva Convention and respect civilian lives during war.
Saleh’s announcement meanwhile came after his recent statements that in addition to this arrest, another two key planners of the attack are in custody while a third was killed in an operation by security forces.
On Saturday, Saleh said at a high-ranking security meeting that a member of the Taliban’s Haqqani Network was behind the attack.
He said the country’s intelligence agency NDS had taken the main perpetrator, identified as Aadil, into custody and that this suspect had once studied at Kabul University’s faculty of Sharia before joining the Taliban.
Saleh also said on Facebook the suspect told officials that the Taliban had aimed to defame the government and make it appear weak.
But the Taliban has rejected government accusations of involvement in the latest attack.
“Claim by #Kabul admin deputy [vice president] of detaining #Kabul Uni attackers & linking them to Haqqani Sahib’s personnel are fabrications. All these allegations are an attempt to divert attention away from joint #Kabul-#ISIS crime & deceive the public,” the group’s spokesman Zabihullah Mujahed tweeted.
The attack was widely condemned by the Afghan government and the international community.
The Embassy of Japan in Afghanistan announced on Friday that the country has allocated $19.5 million in humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan.
In a statement, the Japanese Embassy said it hopes the aid will help bring positive change to the lives of vulnerable Afghans.
According to the statement, the assistance will cover the basic humanitarian needs of vulnerable communities in Afghanistan.
The embassy added that the aid will be delivered through United Nations agencies, international organizations, and Japanese non-governmental organizations operating in Afghanistan.
Japan’s total assistance to Afghanistan since August 2021 has reached more than $549 million.
Security forces at the Islam Qala border in Herat province prevented hundreds of young Afghans from illegally entering Iran.
Officials from the 207 Al-Farooq Army Corps said that around 530 people attempted over the past two days to illegally enter Iranian territory through areas of Kohsan district in Herat, but border forces detained them and transferred them back to their original areas.
Meanwhile, officials in the local administration of Herat said that due to severe cold along the illegal migration route to Iran, three Afghan migrants have lost their lives in the Kohsan district of the province, and a shepherd has also died there for the same reason.
Mohammad Yousuf Saeedi, spokesperson for the Herat governor’s office, said that some statistics and images shared on social media regarding the incident are not reliable.
According to him, further investigations are underway to determine whether any individuals have died on the other side of the border.
President Donald Trump suspended the green card lottery program on Thursday that allowed the suspect in the Brown University and MIT shootings to come to the United States.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a post on the social platform X that, at Trump’s direction, she is ordering the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services to pause the program, the Associated Press reported.
“This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country,” she said of the suspect, Portuguese national Claudio Neves Valente.
Neves Valente, 48, is suspected in the shootings at Brown University that killed two students and wounded nine others, and the killing of an MIT professor. He was found dead Thursday evening from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, officials said.
Neves Valente had studied at Brown on a student visa beginning in 2000, according to an affidavit from a Providence police detective. In 2017, he was issued a diversity immigrant visa and months later obtained legal permanent residence status, according to the affidavit. It was not immediately clear where he was between taking a leave of absence from the school in 2001 and getting the visa in 2017.
The diversity visa program makes up to 50,000 green cards available each year by lottery to people from countries that are little represented in the U.S., many of them in Africa. The lottery was created by Congress, and the move is almost certain to invite legal challenges.
Nearly 20 million people applied for the 2025 visa lottery, with more than 131,000 selected when including spouses with the winners. After winning, they must undergo vetting to win admission to the United States. Portuguese citizens won only 38 slots.
Lottery winners are invited to apply for a green card. They are interviewed at consulates and subject to the same requirements and vetting as other green-card applicants.
Trump has long opposed the diversity visa lottery. Noem’s announcement is the latest example of using tragedy to advance immigration policy goals. After an Afghan man was identified as the gunman in a fatal attack on National Guard members in November, Trump’s administration imposed sweeping rules against immigration from Afghanistan and other counties.
While pursuing mass deportation, Trump has sought to limit or eliminate avenues to legal immigration. He has not been deterred if they are enshrined in law, like the diversity visa lottery, or the Constitution, as with a right to citizenship for anyone born on U.S. soil. The Supreme Court recently agreed to hear his challenge to birthright citizenship.
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