KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (AFP) — Bomb blasts struck two NATO convoys in Afghanistan Wednesday, wounding four foreign soldiers, while five Afghan civilians were killed in separate extremist-linked unrest, officials said.
In an attack claimed by Taliban insurgents, a suicide car bomb struck a Canadian armoured vehicle driving through the southern city of Kandahar, the Canadian military said.
An Afghan man was killed, his body badly burned by the blast which also set a house alight, and at least one civilian was wounded, witnesses and officials said.
A Canadian soldier with NATO's International Security Assistance Force was also injured, said ISAF spokesman Captain Mark Gough.
"It was a suicide car bomb attack against a Canadian convoy... one military vehicle was damaged," said another ISAF spokesman, Captain Fraser Clark.
The Taliban, an Islamic militant group that was in government in Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001, confirmed it was behind the blast -- similar to scores of others carried out by the insurgents.
A roadside bomb, another favoured Taliban weapon, meanwhile struck a vehicle of Romanian troops also serving with ISAF, wounding three of them, the Romanian defence ministry said in Bucharest.
The soldiers were hit on a road linking Kandahar to neighbouring Zabul province, it said, adding the wounded were in a stable condition.
ISAF reported meanwhile that two Afghan women and two children were killed Tuesday when troops returned fire at insurgents who had attacked them in southern Afghanistan.
"Tragically, a group of civilians received fire causing the death of two women and two children," a statement said, without saying where the attack occurred.
Civilian casualties by international soldiers helping the Afghan government defeat a Taliban-led uprising is deeply sensitive and President Hamid Karzai has regularly called on the troops to take more care.
Also linked to Taliban insurgency, the rebels destroyed overnight a mobile phone mast in the western province of Herat late Tuesday, police said.
The attack was the fifth targeting mobile phone antennas since the Taliban warned they would target communication technology unless it was switched off at night because it was being used to pinpoint rebel hideouts.
In the western province of Farah meanwhile, police were searching for five officers missing following a clash with the rebels on Monday, provincial police commander Jalilullah Rahman said.
A policeman seized in the same incident was believed to have been killed by his Taliban captors, Rahman said.
The Taliban, who were removed from government in late 2001, are waging an insurgency that was at its deadliest last year with more than 6,000 people killed -- most of them rebel fighters.
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