…Taliban assassinate Special Forces Commander in Kabul***

Police said eight people were injured when the wall of a mosque fell on them due to heavy rain in Pakistan’s eastern city of Lahore.

Local Urdu TV channels reported on Friday that the victims were offering prayers in the mosque when the wall collapsed in the Model Town area of Lahore, the capital of the country’s eastern Punjab province.

Soon after the incident, police and rescue teams rushed to the scene and shifted the injured people to a nearby hospital.

Hospital sources said five among the injured are in critical condition, hospital sources .

The city and its surroundings have been experiencing intermittent rains in the last few days, after a month-long heat spell.

On Wednesday, at least one person was killed and 14 others were injured in rain-related incidents.

Lahore Electric Supply Company also confirmed that some 150 feeders were tripped due to heavy rain, causing power outages in various areas in the city.

In the meantime, Taliban militants have killed an Afghan Elite Forces Commander in a Kabul Amusement Park, officials said on Friday.

Azizullah Karwan, who had been leading Afghan Special Forces in the country’s embattled southern Paktika province, was gunned down in the park in the capital’s Macrorayan area, Najib Danish, an Interior Ministry spokesman, said.

Three visitors of the park were also wounded in the incident, Danish added.

Kabul police spokesman Hashmat Stanikzai reported via his Facebook page that Karwan as well as two of his relatives, were killed.

Another three relatives were injured, he said.

It remained unclear how many attackers were involved.

The park is a rare space for families, with no security guards around, a resident said.

It offers a few rides for children as well as ice cream parlours.

Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid claimed responsibility for the attack via Twitter, saying that “a famous spy for the American forces’’ was killed.

The Taliban have been intensifying attacks on security forces and government in the past months.

Its leadership is also sending assassins to target higher-ranking soldiers, policemen, government officials, judges and religious scholars.

The UN, in its 2017 annual report, said that 2017, “anti-government elements were responsible for 570 targeted killings that caused 1,032 civilian casualties (650 deaths and 382 injured).’’

Targeted killings accounted for 10 per cent of all civilian casualties, the UN researchers found.