Six Canadian NATO soldiers were killed on Sunday by a roadside bomb in southern Afghanistan, the Canadian defense ministry confirmed. This was the deadliest single attack on NATO in Afghanistan this year.
Six soldiers were killed and two other Canadian troops injured after a roadside bomb exploded near their vehicle west of Kandahar. An earlier report had placed it in neighboring Helmand Province.
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced the news while in France attending a ceremony commemorating Canada's role in the 1917 battle of Vimy.
"Sadly today has been a difficult day in Afghanistan," Harper said. "We've learned that an incident has claimed the lives of six Canadian soldiers and injured a number of others."
A statement from the Canadian defense ministry said the attack had happened at 1:30pm.
Four soldiers were flown by helicopter to a hospital at Kandahar airfield and one with "serious but not life-threatening injuries from the blast" would likely be transferred to a US medical facility in Germany, it said.
Another who only received minor injuries was released from the hospital along with two who were not wounded.
"It's our belief that it was an improvised explosive device," the force's deputy command Mike Cessford told reporters in Kabul.
Earlier, NATO had said in a statement that a seventh soldier from its force was killed in a separate blast. The nationality of this soldier was unknown.
The latest casualties brought to 34 the number of foreign troops to have died in Afghanistan since January. The figure includes those from the US-led coalition.
Canada has some 2,500 soldiers in the south of the country.
The six deaths were the biggest number of NATO International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) casualties killed in a single incident this year. The number of Canadians killed in the country since 2002 now stands at 51.
ISAF did not say who might have planted the bomb, but similar attacks in the past have been blamed on Taliban militants.
Launched months after the ouster of the Taliban by a US-led invasion in late 2001, the insurgency intensified last year.
As part of their campaign the Taliban have widely used roadside bombs, said to be a tactic copied from insurgents fighting the US-led coalition force in Iraq.
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