A suicide car attack killed at least five people in southern Afghanistan on Thursday, police and a hospital doctor said. The blast occurred soon after a convoy of presidential security guards passed through Qalat, the provincial capital of southern Zabul province, on their way back to Kabul from a visit to the south by President Hamid Karzai. Residents said they believed the guards were the intended target.
The bomberÂ’s car hit the vehicle of a provincial police officer who was some distance from the convoy, a policeman said.
The officer and 14 other people were wounded. Most of the victims were civilians, including children, a doctor said.
Also on Thursday, hundreds of tribesmen protested in the southeastern province of Khost demanding the punishment of foreign troops who killed at least four people, including a teenage girl, in a raid in the province on Tuesday. Villagers say those killed were civilians and two were government employees, but the US military said it killed four suspected militants.
Separately, NATO warplanes bombed a compound serving as a Taliban command post in volatile southern Afghanistan, killing a number of insurgents, the NATO-led force said on Thursday. The airstrike targeted the hideout in Kandahar province’s troubled Panjwayi district late on Wednesday “destroying it completely”, a statement from the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said.