A suicide bomber blew himself up on Friday outside a US-funded aid office in Afghanistan while the NATO-led force said it might have killed a senior Taliban leader in an airstrike. Separately, police said 10 Taliban rebels and a policeman died in a battle near the border with Pakistan.Police in Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand province, were following the suicide attacker after a tip-off when the blast happened close to the offices of the Alternative Livelihoods Programme, police said. The NATO-led force in Afghanistan meanwhile said it destroyed a “known insurgent command post” also in Helmand and killed a senior Taliban leader and his deputies. In another incident early on Friday, 10 Taliban militants and a police officer were killed in a gun battle in Paktika province, the provincial governor said.
A man shot dead a member of AfghanistanÂ’s national assembly in Kabul on Friday, a government spokesman said. Mohammad Islam Mohammadi was killed walking to a mosque in an upmarket neighbourhood. Separately, unidentified gunmen killed a police officer in Kandahar province late on Thursday.