Lieutenant Islam Bibi, 37-year-old mother of three, who had survived death threats from her own brother to rise through the ranks, was shot as she left her home 20130703 morning. Lt Bibi had been attacked as she rode on a motorbike alongside her son-in-law in Lashkar Gah, the Helmand provincial capital. She was seriously injured and died of injuries later in the emergency ward in hospital. Lt Bibi was a refugee in Iran when the Taliban overran Afghanistan in the 1990s. She returned in 2001, raising her family at home before joining the police nine years ago. (20130703)

Subinspector Negar, a 35-year-old police officer, was shot by gunmen in Afghanistan's south, months after her predecessor was killed. The shooting 20130915 morning in Helmand's province's Lashkar Gah district was the latest in a series of attacks on prominent Afghan women. Two attackers on a motorbike shot her in the right shoulder outside her home. Her son-in-law, Faizullah Khan, said she was 41 and had two children, a son and a daughter, and that she’d worked for the police in the early 1990s before the Taliban Islamist movement took over the country and banned women from working. Negar was a five-year veteran of the Police Department. She had replaced the late Islam Bibi as a senior investigator. Bibi was also the highest ranking female police officer in Helmand until her assassination in July. (20130915) She died 20130916.

In 2008, Lieutenant Colonel Malalai Kakar, the head of Kandahar’s department of crimes against women, was killed by Taliban militants.

Background:
Helmand has 32 other female Police Officers — less than half of one per cent of the province’s 7,000-strong police force — who face a daily battle, not just against extremists and opium smugglers, but often also against her own family.
An unpublished UN report on female police officers in Afghanistan found accounts of pervasive sexual assault and harassment by their male colleagues, according to Afghan and Western officials familiar with the report. (20130917)

Around 2,200 female police have been serving within the framework of the National Police in the country.(20130918)