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Thursday, July 05, 2007
Suicide attack kills 10 Afghan police (8:55 p.m.)
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan -- A suicide bomber blew himself up at a checkpoint in southern Afghanistan on Thursday, killing 10 police and wounding 11, while a roadside bomb in the east left one NATO soldier dead, authorities said.
The suicide attacker detonated his explosives in a room where the policemen were eating lunch at a checkpoint near Spin Boldak, a town on the Pakistani border, said Bismillah Khan, a local police official.
Spin Boldak's district police chief was among those wounded in the attack, said Sayeed Agha Saqib, the police chief of Kandahar province.
Two of the checkpoint rooms were destroyed, Khan said.
Grisly suicide attacks have become a prominent tactic of Taliban militants, who have dramatically stepped up their campaign of violence against the Western backed government of President Hamid Karzai.
In another echo of the conflict in Iraq, outgunned militants are also deploying roadside bombs to deadly effect against more numerous foreign and Afghan forces.
In eastern Afghanistan, such a bomb hit a NATO convoy Thursday, leaving one soldier dead and wounding two others, the alliance said.
The wounded soldiers were taken to a medical facility for treatment and are in stable condition, NATO said in an e-mailed statement. It didn't release the nationalities of the soldiers. Most of the foreign troops in the east are American.
The blast raised the number of foreign soldiers killed in the country this year to at least 103.
That includes six Canadian soldiers who died along with their Afghan interpreter on Wednesday when a roadside bomb tore through a NATO vehicle in Kandahar's Zhari district.
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said the six had died trying to "defend and protect Afghans and provide them the opportunity to rebuild their lives."
The attack was the deadliest against foreign troops here since May 13, when five Americans, a Canadian, and a Briton died in the crash of a Chinook helicopter in Helmand province. Officials said at the time that a rocket-propelled grenade might have brought down the aircraft.
Thirty-three suspected insurgents and seven Afghan police were reported dead in fighting and attacks in Zhari district earlier this week. The area was the scene of one of NATO's largest-ever operations last fall, and remains highly volatile.
So far this year, more than 2,900 people - mostly militants - have been killed in insurgency-related violence in Afghanistan, according to an Associated Press tally of numbers provided by Western and Afghan officials. (AP)
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