Roadside bomb kills 10 workers, wounds 28 in Afghanistan

Boys attend to their wounded father at a hospital after a roadside bomb blast in the Panjwai district of Kandahar on Tuesday.

 

Kabul: A roadside bomb tore through a truck with workers in the restive Kandahar province yesterday, killing 10 and wounding 28 as they were being driven to work to clean streams in southern Afghanistan, officials said.
Also yesterday, an Afghan deputy intelligence chief escaped an attempted suicide bombing in the nation's capital, an attack that was immediately claimed by the Taliban, while Nato said insurgents had killed another service member.
The latest attacks came as Nato's Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said that plans to hand over control of seven provinces to Afghan soldiers in July remain on course despite new bombings and assaults by insurgents.
Nato also acknowledged yesterday that soldiers shot dead an Afghan holding a flashlight during a raid, something that could add to the growing anti-foreigner sentiment in Afghanistan after nearly a decade of war.
The workers on the truck were employed by the local government in the region to clean rivers and streams there, according to Dr Qayoum Pakhla, the director of Kandahar Hospital. Meanwhile, Ahmad Ziad, a deputy chief at the National Directorate for Security, was uninjured in an attempted suicide bombing that targeted his car as he was travelling to work yesterday morning in Kabul, police said.