An Afghan district governor survived an assassination attempt blamed on Taliban insurgents on Thursday, while a suicide attacker blew himself up near an army patrol, killing a soldier, officials said. A bomb ripped through a vehicle carrying a district chief in the eastern province of Nangarhar, police said. Gunmen opened fire on the vehicle just after the blast. Mohammad Ali, the chief of Kama district, and his driver were wounded, provincial police spokesman Ghafoor Khan said. He blamed the attack on the Taliban. A man claiming to be a Taliban commander told police by telephone Meanwhile, a suicide attacker walked up to Afghan soldiers on foot patrol in the capital of the southeastern province of Paktika and blew himself up, provincial governor Mohammad Akram Khepelwak said. “One soldier was martyred and three other soldiers and two civilians were wounded in the suicide blast,” he said. Afghan Interior Ministry spokesman Zemarai Bashary blamed the blast on the “enemies of peace”.
In Kunar province, a man setting a bomb near an Indian roadworks company was killed when the device exploded prematurely, a governor said. Police said the man had been trying to attach the bomb to a pipe that ran underneath a road near the company’s compound on a highway the group was building. “It seems that there might have been two bombers because of the pieces of flesh and parts of body scattered in the area, but it is difficult to confirm,” Kunar police chief Abdul Jalal said.