An eight-year-old girl wearing an explosive suicide vest was stopped by Afghan police as she tried to carry out a deadly attack.
The Interior Ministry said police had apprehended the young girl who had intended to carry out a suicide attack against Afghan border police in southern Helmand province.
The girl, named as Spozhmay, by NDTV, is reported to be as young as eight and thought to be the sister of a prominent Taliban commander.
She was said to be in a state of shock and confusion.
In a statement, the Interior Ministry said the girl claimed her brother, a local Taliban commander, had sent her on the mission.
According to spokesman Sediq Sediqi, one of the Afghan soldiers spotted the girl wearing a suicide jacket.
But she was arrested before she could carry the attack as she struggled to operate the detonator.
The girl has now been transferred to the provincial capital of Lashkar Gah.
In 2011 an eight-year-old girl died after she was tricked into carrying a concealed bomb close to a police vehicle, where it was remotely detonated.
The incident occurred in a remote village called Uwshi, in the Charchino District, said Fazal Ahmad Shirzad, the police chief of Uruzguan Province.
In July it emerged that Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan are bribing starving children as young as eight years old to plant deadly roadside booby traps, be decoys in ambushes and even act as suicide bombers.
Despite the Islamic fundamentalists’ claim they have no children in their ranks, extremists have been actively recruiting orphaned and homeless young boys and training them to use guns, improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and suicide vests.
New recruit: A young boy named only as Neaz told investigators how he was just eight-years-old when he was promised a handful of coins, worth about 60p, if he joined their cause.
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