Suspected Taliban gunmen on motorbikes ambushed a female provincial councillor's car in southern Afghanistan, killing her husband, police said on Wednesday.
Separately, NATO forces said they killed 11 Taliban insurgents in air raids and artillery strikes in the east of the country on Sunday.
The gunmen struck as legislator Zarghona Kakar and her husband stopped at a roadside bakery in Kandahar province late Tuesday, provincial police chief Esmatullah Alizai said.
Kakar was unhurt, but the gunmen mowed down her husband as he left the car to buy bread, Alizai told AFP.
"Police launched an investigation into the incident but had not arrested anyone so far. The men who carried out the attack covered their faces and were not recognised," he said.
Alizai blamed the "enemies of Afghanistan" for the attack. Afghan officials use the term to refer to the Taliban movement that has been leading an increasingly violent insurgency since being ousted in late 2001.
Kakar is one of three women in the male-dominated council for Kandahar province, which was the birthplace of the Taliban regime.
In September, the women's affairs director of the volatile province was killed in a similar attack. Safia Amajan died on September 25 when gunmen on a motorcycle sprayed her car with bullets as she went to work.
Police arrested a man who confessed to the assassination of Amajan. He was a former member of the radical Hezb-e-Islami militia led by wanted former premier Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and had been offered 4,000 dollars for the killing.
The attacks have highlighted the dangers still facing women in post-Taliban Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, one Afghan soldier was killed and two were wounded when their vehicle hit a roadside bomb Monday night in the Panjwayi district of Kandahar province, the southern corps commander General Rahmatullah Raufi told AFP.
The NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said Wednesday it had killed 11 insurgents in air and artillery attacks in the Nari district of eastern Kunar province Sunday.
"In three successful engagements, ISAF forces disrupted the insurgents' attempts to attack ISAF forces," an ISAF statement said.
"Eleven enemy insurgents were assessed to have been killed in the operation."