Agence France-Presse,
Taliban rebels attacked a convoy carrying supplies for foreign troops Thursday, killing 10 Afghan guards, as three civilians died in a blast targeting a police chief, officials said.
The Taliban are leading a bloody insurgency against the US-backed government of President Hamid Karzai and international foreign forces as well as those working for them which has claimed thousands of lives.
The convoy of trucks was ambushed by dozens of militants in Zabul province on the main highway between Kabul and southern Kandahar city.
About 80 private security guards escorting the convoy fought the militants near provincial capital Qalat, an official from the security company said.
“I've lost 10 guards,” official Mohammad Saleem said. “It was very intense fighting. It lasted two hours and we were under siege by Taliban,” he said.
The convoy had earlier left Bagram Air Base — the main US-led military base — north of the capital Kabul and was heading to Kandahar.
Earlier Thursday three Afghan civilians were killed and over a dozen wounded by a Taliban home-made bomb aimed at the police chief of insurgency-hit southern Helmand province, police and medics said.
“I was in the same convoy. As our first vehicle passed … the bomb was detonated. Me and my entire team are unharmed, we're fine,” the police chief, Mohammad Hussin Andiwal, said after the blast in the town of Greshk.
The police chief said a total of 10 people had been killed or wounded, but said he had no further details. A doctor in the town's hospital said at least three people were killed and 14 others, all passers-by, were injured.
The police chief said he was travelling from the provincial capital of Lashkar Gah to visit local authorities in Greshk when the attack took place.
The bomb was planted in a hand-cart parked at the side of the road near a bridge, and operated by remote control, local official Abdul Manaf told AFP, blaming the attack on the Taliban.
Roadside bombs are becoming a weapon of choice for the rebels. One of the devices killed two German police officers and a foreign ministry employee in Kabul last Thursday.
Afghan intelligence said Thursday that it has detained a teenage militant who detonated the bomb aimed at the Germans in the eastern outskirts of Kabul.
“I can confirm that we've detained a boy (aged) around 15 or 16 years who detonated the bomb,” a spokesman for the Afghan spy agency, Sayeed Ansary, told AFP.
Also a foreign soldier was Thursday killed in a traffic incident on a crowded road just north of Kabul, NATO's International Security Assistance Force said in a statement.
The multi-national force did not reveal the name and nationality of the dead trooper. The accident brought to 139 the number of foreign soldiers killed in Afghanistan this year, most of them in combat.
