About 60 fleeing Taliban guerrillas were confirmed dead after their boat sank in a river in southern Afghanistan, the defence ministry here said Sunday.
“According to reports we received, all of them on board were Taliban and were killed,” defence ministry spokesman General Mohammad Zahir Azimi told reporters.
He said on Saturday the ministry was investigating if the roughly 60 people on board the boat that sank in the southern province of Helmand on Friday had drowned, and who they were.
“They were Taliban,” Azimi told a media briefing on Sunday, adding efforts by military forces to recover many bodies from the river had failed.
“But we still continue to recover as many bodies as possible,” he said.The rebels had been fleeing military forces.