Suicide bomber kills 5 kids in Afghanistan
A suicide car bomber blew himself up next to a police truck bringing a southern Afghan official to work early yesterday, killing five children nearby, officials said.
The blast struck about 9 am local time near a market area in Dand district to the west of Kandahar city, according to the district police chief Ahmadullah Nazak.
"I dropped down. Then I heard a second explosion," Nazak said. "It hit our car, but it didn't injure me." Five children who were near the site of the blast were killed, the Interior Ministry said in a statement.
A bodyguard who was driving with Nazak was wounded, he said.
No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack, though it fits the pattern of Taliban attacks targeting government officials in the south. As additional US forces have poured into southern Taliban strongholds in Kandahar and Helmand provinces, Taliban insurgents have mounted a counter-campaign of bombings and assassinations aimed at those affiliated with the Afghan government.
Meanwhile, a senior adviser to President Hamid Karzai was badly wounded in a bomb attack Monday as he travelled in eastern Afghanistan, a provincial spokesman told AFP.
Waheedullah Sabawoon, adviser on tribal affairs to the president, was on a personal visit in Jalalabad, the capital of Nangarhar province, when a bomb placed in a rickshaw exploded and hit his vehicle.
The blast wounded the adviser and a tribal elder travelling with him, along with five civilians near their vehicle, said spokesman Ahmad Zia Abdulzai.
In the east meanwhile, Nato forces said they captured a local insurgent commander in Paktia province and killed "several insurgents" in an air strike on a vehicle after troops saw the commander putting an anti-aircraft gun inside. A spokesman for Nato forces, Sgt Michael Reinsch, declined to say how many insurgents were killed.
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