The most senior female police officer in Afghanistan’s Helmand province, who became a symbol of improving women’s rights as the Taliban were kept at bay, has been shot dead.

Lt. Islam Bibi, who had survived death threats from her own brother to rise through the ranks, was shot as she left her home Thursday morning.

Ummar Zawaq, a spokesman for the governor of Helmand, said Bibi had been attacked as she rode on a motorcycle alongside her son-in-law in Lashkar Gah, the provincial capital.

“She was seriously injured and died of injuries later in the emergency ward in hospital,” he added.

The 37-year-old mother of three had been a role model for other women in a province that remains a hotbed of the Taliban insurgency and where few women are seen on the streets, and then only wearing a burka.

Like her 32 other female colleagues — less than half of one per cent of the province’s 7,000-strong police force — she faced a daily battle, not just against extremists and opium smugglers, but against her own family.

In an interview with The Telegraph earlier this year, she said: “My brother, father and sisters were all against me. In fact my brother tried to kill me three times.

“He came to see me brandishing his pistol trying to order me not to do it, though he didn’t actually open fire. The government eventually had to take his pistol away.”

Bibi was a refugee in Iran when the Taliban overran Afghanistan in the ’ 90s. She returned in 2001, raising her family at home before joining the police nine years ago.

“Firstly, I needed the money. But, secondly, I love my country,” she said in April. “I feel proud wearing the uniform and I want to try to make Afghanistan a better and stronger country.”

Police in Helmand said it was too soon to speculate about who may have been behind the murder.

Also, on the outskirts of Lashkar Gah, roadside bombs killed four young girls.

The girls, aged 10 to 12 years, had been sent by their families to a river to fetch water.

The bomb went off alongside a footpath through a field the girls had taken to make their way back home, Zawaq said.

And in the eastern province of Paktika, two schoolboys were killed on their way walking home from classes in the afternoon when they triggered a roadside bomb, the governor’s office said in a statement.