Afghanistan's Ghani meets family of Japanese doctor killed in attack

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani on Friday (December 6) met with the relatives of Tetsu Nakamura, a Japanese doctor and aid worker killed in an attack in eastern Afghanistan.

Nakamura was killed on Wednesday (December 4) by unknown gunmen who riddled the car he and five others were driving in the city of Jalalabad.

Born in western Japan, Nakamura, 73, trained as a doctor and answered a 1984 recruitment call to work in a clinic treating leprosy in the Pakistani city of Peshawar, attracted by the region's stark beauty.

He began treating Afghan refugees who were pouring over the border in the wake of the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which led to him opening a clinic in that country in 1991.

Following a devastating 2000 drought which brought scores of starving and ill people to his clinic, he first helped bore wells and then came up with the idea of an irrigation canal, inspired by similarities between Japanese and Afghan rivers.

In 2003 - the same year Nakamura was awarded the Ramon Magsaysay Award, often called Asia's Nobel - construction began. After six gruelling years of labour, much of it by hand and in temperatures as high as 50 Celsius, the canal was finally completed.

Since then, some 16,000 hectares (40,000 acres) of the desert has been brought back to life, making Nakamura such a widely revered figure in Afghanistan that earlier this year he became the first foreigner awarded Afghan citizenship.