|
Suicide bomber targets Spin Boldak bus station
A SUICIDE bomb rocked an Afghan town bordering Pakistan, killing four people, as insurgency-linked unrest claimed the lives of another 13, including a foreign soldier.The suicide blast, detonated by a man on a bomb-filled motorbike, tore through a busy bus station in the southern town of Spin Boldak, police said. "Including the suspect, five were killed and eight were wounded," said the Kandahar province border police chief, Jawad Ahmad. However, the interior ministry said three people - a man, a woman and a child - were killed in the suicide attack, without explaining the discrepancy. Eleven were wounded, including five children, the ministry said, adding that the device had exploded before the bomber reached his target. There was no claim of responsibility for the attack but militants allied to the extremist Taliban militia, which has carried out scores of suicide attacks, are active in southern Afghanistan and across the border in Pakistan. Meanwhile, a soldier in a NATO-led force operating against Taliban insurgents was killed in a "hostile incident", the International Security Assistance Force said in a statement that gave no further details. It did not give the nationality of the dead soldier or details of the incident. Most of the troops in the south are Americans, British or Canadians. Elsewhere, Taliban militants ambushed a private security company in the southwestern province of Nimroz, killing three armed guards and wounding one, provincial governor Ghulam Dastagir Azad said. "The Afghan army and US-led coalition forces went to the area for their support and killed three Taliban and wounded five," he said. There has been a spate of deadly insurgent attacks recently on convoys that ferry goods across the country, including to bases of the nearly 70,000 foreign troops deployed to help the Afghan Government. Afghan and US-led coalition forces killed two "opposition commanders" in the southern province of Kandahar on Friday, the interior ministry said in a statement that did not give details of the men. Another four militants were killed in incidents in Farah province in the south and Paktika in the east, officials said. Attacks and battles have surged in recent weeks as troops try to clamp down on insurgents ahead of August 20 elections and after the extremists vowed to step up their campaign. There are fears the violence will disrupt the elections, an important test for international efforts to bring democracy to Afghanistan. The Taliban were in government for five years until 2001, when they were toppled in a US-led invasion weeks after the September 11 attacks on the United States, blamed on the al-Qaeda network, which had bases in Afghanistan. Posted by: Oztralian 2009-06-06 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=271373 |