September 15, 2008
9 Afghans Are Killed by Bombs
By REUTERS
KABUL, Afghanistan (Reuters) -- A suicide bomber rammed a car into a United Nations convoy on Sunday as it drove through a market in southern Afghanistan, killing a driver and two local doctors, United Nations officials and the police said.
In a separate bombing, 6 children were killed and 12 were wounded when a roadside bomb that they were playing with exploded in Ghazni Province, south of Kabul. The district governor, Rahim Daisiwal, said the bomb had been planted by Taliban militants.
The police said 16 people had been wounded in the attack on the United Nations convoy, part of rising violence this year by the Taliban. The bombing occurred on a road in the town of Spinbaldak, on the border with Pakistan.
The doctors were working for the United Nations' World Health Organization on a polio vaccination campaign in the region.
"This attack was on innocent civilians working only for the people of Afghanistan, and is beyond comprehension," the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan said in a statement.
The Taliban, in an online posting, claimed responsibility for the convoy attack.
Nearly 3,000 people have died in violence in Afghanistan this year, the bloodiest period since the Taliban's overthrow in 2001. But fatalities among United Nations workers are rarer. The last previous United Nations staff member to be killed in Afghanistan was an Afghan driver killed in Kandahar by a remote-controlled explosion in April 2007, according to a United Nations spokesman, Dan McNorton.
In another attack on Sunday, a roadside bomb killed a provincial official and two of his bodyguards after the device hit their vehicle in southern Zabul Province, an official said.
A British soldier was killed Saturday in an explosion in Helmand, a province in southern Afghanistan where the Taliban remain strong. His death raised the number of British troops killed in Afghanistan to 120 since the 2001 United States-led invasion.