Afghan authorities have arrested and handed over to U.S. forces a Taliban official suspected of orchestrating raids in which two dozen people, including aid workers, have died, officials said on Sunday.
Mohammad Younis, former chief of the ousted Taliban's customs department at Kabul airport, was captured from his home in Nawzad district in the southern province of Helmand during a raid on Saturday, they added.
"We then handed him over to the Americans who had requested it," Helmand's intelligence chief, Dad Mohammad Khan, told Reuters by telephone.
"We suspect that Younis has been leading the attacks in various parts of Helmand. But we have to prove that and it is too early to say anything as the Americans have not finished questioning him."
Attacks in Helmand in the past five months have claimed the lives of Afghan security forces and several local aid workers, some serving for western aid groups, he said.
Helmand was once a stronghold of the Taliban militia overthrown by U.S.-led forces in 2001 for harboring Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida network.
The raids there are part of a wave of violence in which more than 400 people, including civilians, aid workers, militants, Afghan forces and more than a dozen U.S.-led troops have been killed, mainly in the south and east since August.
Some of the militants arrested and handed to the 12,000-strong U.S.-led force are in American custody in Afghanistan while others are in being held in Guantanamo Bay.
The whereabouts of bin Laden, suspected of masterminding the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, and Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammad Omar are unknown.
Afghan officials say Omar is alive, but the U.S. military says it does not know if bin Laden is alive or dead.
In a separate incident, several civilians were wounded when an explosive device went off near a hotel outside the eastern city of Jalalabad on Friday night, officials said, blaming militants for the attack.