Agence France-Presse,
WARSAW (AFP): A Polish soldier was killed Tuesday by the Taliban in eastern Afghanistan, the first fatality for Poland since it joined the NATO-led security force in March 2002.
Defence Minister Aleksander Szczyglo said that Lukasz Kurowski, 28, had “died in the line of duty” after his convoy was attacked some 20 kilometres (12 miles) from a base in Gardez in Paktia province near the border with Pakistan.
Second Lieutenant Kurowski was taking part in a joint patrol of NATO troops and the Afghan army on Tuesday when his Hummer vehicle came under fire, the Polish defence ministry said.
He was injured by a grenade blast and later died in hospital, the ministry said in a statement.
Earlier Tuesday, security officials in Afghanistan had announced that a NATO soldier had been killed when insurgents ambushed a patrol in the area, without revealing the victim's name and nationality because of standard policy.
Five Afghan soldiers were wounded in the same incident, an Afghan army general told AFP.
Last month, four Polish soldiers were injured by a roadside bomb north of the Afghan capital Kabul.
Polish troops in Afghanistan have recently complained that their vehicles are not sufficiently protected against attacks.
Eleven soldiers were sent home in June after refusing to go on patrol because of what they called “insufficient armouring of the American Hummer vehicles,” defence ministry spokesman Jaroslaw Rybak said at the time.
Poland earlier this year increased its existing Afghanistan contingent of around 200 troops to the current 1,200.
But their presence their remains controversial at home, with parliamentary opposition coming from both the left and the far-right.
A June poll of 903 people in Poland found almost 78 percent of respondents opposed to their country's participation in the NATO-led force in Afghanistan.
The Poles are part of the 36,000-strong International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) which is battling a Taliban-led insurgency.
They are responsible for security in the provinces of Paktika and Ghazni in the southeast of the country.
Polish crack units are also stationed in southern Afghanistan as part of a separate US-led force which is hunting down insurgents.
Kurowski's death brought the number of international troops killed this year to 135, according to an AFP count, most of them in action as the Taliban insurgency has spiralled. Five have been killed since Saturday.
NATO troops are battling the extremist religious Taliban movement, which launched an insurgency months after being removed from government in 2001 in a US-led invasion, and has stepped up attacks over the past year.
Meanwhile in Kabul on Tuesday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad dismissed US and British claims that Iranian weapons were being supplied to the Taliban.
