Agence France-Presse,
A series of roadside bombings in Afghanistan Wednesday killed eight people, including three NATO soldiers, in new attacks linked to a growing Taliban insurgency.
Police in the east of the country said meanwhile a local man had gone into a mosque Tuesday and shot dead three people. Police would not immediately link the man, known as a local ruffian, to the insurgency.
The three NATO-led International Security Assistance Force soldiers were killed in the volatile south of the country when a bomb tore through their vehicle, ISAF announced in a statement.
The 37-nation coalition gave no other details, including the nationalities of the soldiers or the location of the attack.
A spokesman for the Taliban, Yousuf Ahmadi, said however insurgents had blown up a foreign forces' vehicle in the province of Helmand. Several of the troops were dead, he claimed.
Most of ISAF's British contingent, which numbers about 6,700, is based in Helmand but soldiers of other nationalities also operate in the province — where opium traders said to be allied with militants.
Ninety-one foreign soldiers have now died in Afghanistan this year, most of them in combat and about half of them from the United States which has the most soldiers in the international operation in Afghanistan.
Another bomb blew up a police vehicle in the eastern province of Khost, killing Qalandar district police chief Ali Mohammad and one of his men, a spokesman for the provincial governor told AFP.
In the southern province of Zabul, a bomb ripped into the vehicle of US-based private security company USPI, killing two guards and wounding a third, deputy provincial police chief Ghulam Jalani said.
Another bomb exploded on a road in Ghazni province and killed a man who was cycling home after buying groceries, a district governor said.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for the blast but said it had struck a police vehicle.
The hardliners rely on bombs, including suicide blasts, in their fight against the government and its allies. The military says this is a sign of the rebels' weakness and inability to fight conventional warfare.
Taliban overran a district in Kandahar province late Monday, forcing the small police force there to flee, but they were removed less than 24 hours later.
They took another Kandahar district Tuesday and police said Wednesday they were planning an operation to remove them with ISAF's help.
In another incident of violence, a man opened fire on worshippers in a mosque in Khost during evening prayers Tuesday, killing three people and wounding four others, police said Wednesday.
Provincial police spokesman Wazir Badshah said the reason for the attack was not clear but the gunman, who escaped, did not seem to have links with militants.
The governor of eastern Nangarhar province told reporters meanwhile that authorities were holding two men who had confessed to being would-be suicide bombers who had been trained in Pakistan.
“They have confessed that I was their target,” governor Gul Agha Shirzay said.
