Last Sunday, September 15, Lieutenant Nagar, a top female police officer in the Afghanistan province of Helmand, was shot to death by a gunman while she was on patrol duty near the police headquarters. She has since died of her injuries, a gunshot wound to the neck, in a Middle Eastern hospital.

Lieutenant Nagar was a senior police officer and a woman respected in the community of Lashkar Gah, capital of the Helmand province. She is the third female police officer of high status to have been killed while in the line of duty. Last July, another policewoman named Islam Bibi, was shot while she was on her way to work.

Drug traders and conservative Taliban supporters are included as the leading perpetrators of these crimes against female police officers. Nobody has come forward to claim responsibility for the crime, however, with the killers nevertheless being labelled as "enemies of Afghanistan."

The BBC have confirmed that both British and American troops are slowly packing up and withdrawing their military forces, leaving enforcement against rebel insurgents largely up to the Afghani Police force, less than one percent of which are women, with at least 1,500 serving in the ranks, and another 200 still in training.

Female Police officers are reportedly bullied by their male counterparts, and face greater threats as targets of the insurgency, in a society that still believes women are second-class citizens. Negar's predecessor had faced even threats from her own family, saying that her brother had tried to kill her thrice, before being shot while on a motorcycle with her son-in-law.

Lt. Nagar was said to have been walking back to the Helmand Police Station after a patrol round, when an unidentified gunman (or gunmen, as the number of suspects have yet to be ascertained in the investigation) drove near her on a motorbike and shot her in the neck.  Lt. Nagar passed away in the hospital she was admitted to this Sunday evening. She was 45 years old.

"This is a very big loss for us," Provincial Government Spokesperson Omar Zawak said in a statement, "she was a very brave woman. It will be very difficult for us to replace her."