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17 killed in Afghan blast
 Seventeen civilians, including children, were killed and around 30 others wounded when a suicide bomber blew himself up near a North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) convoy in southern Afghanistan on Tuesday, police said. Soldiers with NATOs International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) were also wounded in the attack, some of them seriously, an ISAF spokesman said.The bomber was on foot and blew himself up as a convoy of ISAF troops were passing through a bazaar in the town of Dehrawood in the southern province of Uruzgan, provincial police chief General Mohammad Qasem said. There was a suicide bombing. Seventeen people, all of them civilians, have been killed and around 30 others were injured, he told said. Some of the dead were schoolchildren, he said. ISAF said that it was most likely a suicide attack. There are ISAF and civilian casualties, spokesman Major John Thomas said in Kabul, adding that the ISAF soldiers were badly wounded. A spokeswoman for the NATO-led force in Kabul said that six Afghan civilians were killed and 13 wounded. Seven soldiers from the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) were also hurt, she said. This is an indiscriminate use of a Taliban extremist bombings, which have killed and injured both civilians and soldiers, said Lieutenant-Colonel Mike Smith, the ISAF spokesman in the south. The NATO-led force did not give out the nationalities of its casualties and would not confirm that the blast was in Uruzgan, where most ISAF troops are Australian or Dutch. There was no immediate claim of responsibility but the extremist Taliban movement, which is waging an insurgency backed by Al-Qaeda, has carried out similar attacks. Tuesdays was the deadliest suicide attack since the one in Kabul on June 17 that killed 35 people, most of whom were police trainers. Separately, a soldier with the US-led coalition in Afghanistan died of wounds suffered earlier in a shooting on a military base in the west of the country, the force said Tuesday. The shooting was in Guzara district in the Herat province, the same area where two Afghan soldiers were killed and several other troops were wounded when another opened fire on a military base on Monday. An investigation into the events surrounding the soldiers death is being conducted, the coalition said in a statement. A military official who wished to remain unnamed said that two US advisers were also wounded in the latest shooting. Taliban insurgents have increased the number of suicide attacks against the nearly 50,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan this year after suffering heavy casualties in conventional attacks. Some 6,000 people have been killed, including 1,500 civilians, in Afghanistan in the last 18 months. Posted by: Fred 2007-07-11 |
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