KANDAHAR: Two suicide bombers attacked police stations in southern Afghanistan yesterday, killing 10 Afghan policemen and two civilians and underlining the growing threat from a Taleban-led insurgency.
The attacks, which also wounded around 30 people, followed a deadly weekend in which nine US and European soldiers were killed along with several civilians and militants in Afghanistan's spiraling wave of extremist violence.
The most deadly was outside the provincial police headquarters in Lashkar Gah, the capital of the turbulent province of Helmand, with the attacker disguised as a policeman in uniform.
"Eleven people, nine of them policemen and two civilians, were killed in a suicide bomb attack in Lashkar Gah," the Interior Ministry said in a statement.
Twenty-eight others, also mostly policemen, were wounded, the statement said. The provincial health department gave a similar toll.
A Taleban spokesman, Yousuf Ahmadi, said a member of his militia had carried out the attack and killed 47 policemen — a clear exaggeration. The deputy provincial police chief, who is named only Kamalludin, was at the scene when the bomb exploded but survived unharmed.
"I had just arrived with a five-vehicle police convoy. A man wearing police uniform walked toward us and exploded. Two of my bodyguards were also killed," he said.
President Hamid Karzai condemned the attack in a statement that said targeting police showed that the insurgents were afraid of the growing force. The European Union, which is training the police, said it was "appalled."
Helmand is one of the most intense battlefields in the international fight against Taleban, who were in government between 1996 and 2001, and their allies in the Al-Qaeda network.
Yesterday's other suicide attack was at the police headquarters in the turbulent Delaram district of southwestern Farah province, police said.
A suicide bomber killed a policeman outside the building with a hand grenade then grabbed the dead man's weapon and ran into the compound, said the police spokesman for western Afghanistan, Abdul Rauf Ahmadi.
Officers fired at the attacker and bombs strapped to his body exploded, he said. Two shopkeepers were wounded.
