A suicide attacker detonated a car bomb at a police checkpoint in southern Afghanistan Saturday, killing three policemen and two civilian men on a motorbike, police said. Another five people were hurt in the blast outside the southern city of Kandahar on the key road leading to Herat in the west, local police commander Mohammad Akbar told AFP.
"Initial assessments show that three policemen and two civilians are killed. Four police and a civilian are wounded," Akbar said. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the blast but it was similar to others by extremist Taliban insurgents, who regularly attack Afghan troops and their international counterparts.
Police had been searching vehicles at a road checkpoint when the attacker drove his four-wheel drive up to them and detonated his explosives, the police commander said. Canadian soldiers serving with a Nato-led military force were metres (yards) away at the time of the blast. They helped to evacuate the wounded.
The car bombing took place near the Zhari district, where a Canadian soldier was killed and three others wounded in a bomb blast on Friday in an attack subsequently announced by the Canadian military. The attack took to 104 the number of Canadian soldiers killed since its military mission began in Afghanistan in 2002, months after the Taliban were driven from government for sheltering al Qaeda.
The Canadians are a key part of the multinational military force in southern Afghanistan, the birthplace of the Taliban and an area where the militants' insurgency is fierce. There were also two suicide car bombs in western Afghanistan on Friday. Only the attackers were killed in the blasts, although three foreigners were wounded in an attack in Herat.
The US military, which provides most of the nearly 70,000 international troops in Afghanistan, announced meanwhile that soldiers had killed six suspected militants in the southern province of Helmand on Thursday. The men were seen collecting weapons from a cache and had shown "hostile intent," it said in a statement Saturday. Their identities could not be independently verified.