KABUL, Afghanistan, July 4 (UPI) -- A top female Afghan police officer died of wounds she received in an attack Thursday in the restive Helmand province, officials said.
Six children also died Thursday from improvised explosive devices, The New York Times reported. Four girls were killed in Helmand and two boys in Paktika province.
A spokesman for Helmand police said Lt. Islam Bibi was ambushed as she left her home in Lashkar Gah, the province's capital, the BBC reported.
Officials said Bibi, 37, led 32 female police officers and was considered a role model for women in the conservative province.
Bibi was on a motorbike with her son-in-law when she was wounded in the attack. The mother of three died in a hospital, officials said.
Omar Zwak, a government spokesman in Helmand, said the girls who died in Helmand were ages 5 to 8. He said they went outside to get water and one stepped on a bomb as they carried buckets in for a wedding party, the Times said.
The boys, 10 and 12, were killed as they walked home from school, said Mokhlis Afghan, a spokesman for the Paktika provincial government.
"Such attacks on civilians, and especially on schoolchildren, shows that the sworn enemies of Afghanistan cannot tolerate seeing our children going to school," Paktika's governor, Muhibullah Samim, said in a statement.
