Two Associated Press journalists shot in Afghanistan

Photographer Anja Niedringhaus is killed and another wounded after attack in Khost province on eve of presidential election.

An Afghan police officer has shot dead a foreign photographer and badly injured another in the country's violent east, as they were covering preparations for the country's presidential election, The Guardian reports.

The man opened fire on Anja Niedringhaus and Kathy Gannon from the Associated Press in a police headquarters in Khost province, after the women arrived with a convoy of election materials on Friday.

Niedringhaus died almost immediately from wounds to her head, a health official said, and Gannon was taken to hospital with less serious injuries, and was in a stable condition. Both were veteran correspondents with long experience covering Afghanistan.

It was the third attack on journalists in Afghanistan in less than a month. The Swedish-British radio reporter Nils Horner was killed in downtown Kabul on 11 March. Less than two weeks later the leading Afghan reporter Ahmad Sardar was gunned down with his wife and two children at a Kabul hotel where they had gone to celebrate the Persian new year.

The AP journalists had travelled to Tani district as part of a government convoy from the provincial capital, but in their own car. They were waiting in the vehicle at the entrance to the police compound when a police lieutenant named as Naquibullah came over and opened fire on them. No one else was injured.

"He has been arrested and is under investigation," said a spokesman for the provincial governor Mubarez Zadran.

The assailant was from another part of Afghanistan and had been working in Khost province for about a year, he said.