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Suicide car attack kills six in Kabul

The carcass of a car used in a suicide attack on US troops burns in Kabul, Afghanistan, yesterday. PHOTO: AP

A suicide car bomber rammed a convoy carrying foreign troops near the airport in Kabul yesterday, killing six civilians and wounding 18, police said.

The Taliban movement claimed responsibility for the blast, which happened during the morning rush-hour on one of the city's busiest roads and damaged around a dozen vehicles.

"Six civilians were martyred and 18 other civilians were wounded in the suicide car bomb attack against coalition forces," Kabul police chief General Salim Ahsas said.

Ahsas said the blast did not harm foreign troops who were travelling on the road to Kabul's international airport when the bomb exploded.

A spokesman for the coalition could not immediately comment on the incident.

Two armored vehicles, apparently the target of the attack, were damaged, a reporter at the scene said. Blood and scraps of human flesh littered the road along with the wreckage of cars, some of which were on fire.

The force of the blast damaged about 10 cars, said General Ali Shah Paktiawal, head of the police criminal investigation branch.

The wounded were rushed to different hospitals in the city, he said.

The Taliban said it was behind the blast -- similar to scores of others carried out by the insurgents.

"We claim responsibility for the suicide attack in Kabul today," Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said in a telephone call from an unknown location.

"The attack was against two foreign military vehicles which killed all the soldiers in the two vehicles," he said.

The Taliban have often made claims about casualties from attacks which subsequently prove exaggerated.

Heavily guarded Kabul has suffered a rash of recent suicide bombings.

The last attack in Kabul was on Jan. 31 when a suicide attacker detonated his explosives-laden vehicle near an army bus, killing a civilian and wounding a handful of people, including an army officer.

On Jan. 14 Taliban militants staged a multiple suicide attack on the five-star Kabul Serena hotel that killed at least eight people, three of them foreign nationals.

That attack -- which involved suicide blasts, gunfire and grenade explosions -- was the first of its kind in the city and different in style to the Taliban's regular fare of suicide and roadside bombings.

Last year was the deadliest of an insurgency launched soon after the Taliban's five-year government was ended in an invasion led by the US with the backing of anti-Taliban Afghan movements.

About 6,000 people were killed, most of them insurgents but also about 1,500 civilians.

In other violence yesterday, a roadside bomb killed three policemen and wounded four in the southern province of Ghazni.
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