A suicide car bomb struck a US-led coalition convoy near the airport in Kabul, killing a foreign soldier and five Afghans in one of a series of attacks on Saturday by the Taliban.
It was the third suicide bombing in the capital in eight days claimed by the extremist militia, which was also blamed for a wave of violence across Afghanistan that left around a dozen other Afghans dead on Saturday.
"One coalition soldier was killed," a spokesman for the force, Sergeant Dean Welch, said.
He could not release the nationality of the man who died, although most troops serving with the US-led coalition are US nationals.
Five Afghan civilians were killed and five wounded in the powerful blast, interior ministry spokesman Zemarai Bashary said.
The wounded included a woman and a schoolgirl aged about seven, the health ministry said.
The Taliban, driven from power in a US-led invasion that started six years ago, had vowed to step up its deadly attacks during Ramadan.
The coalition said the explosion, around 500m from the airport, targeted two of its armored vehicles. One of them flipped and struck two civilian cars, a witness said.
The car-bomb attack struck soon after Canadian Foreign Minister Maxime Bernier and Minister for International Cooperation Beverly Oda flew into Kabul to meet President Hamid Karzai.
Karzai strongly condemned the blast and blamed "outside" influences -- a likely reference to al-Qaeda or extremist elements in neighboring Pakistan said to support the insurgency.
"Such brutal and un-Islamic attacks have no room in Afghanistan culture and such plots are imposed on Afghans from outside," he said in a statement.
A wide area around the van, which was reduced to a chunk of flaming metal, was covered in fragments of metal, broken trees and other debris. The shattered body of the bomber lay on the side of the road.
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