Five suspected Taliban militants were killed when a suicide car bomb they were building went off prematurely in the southern province of Kandahar, police said on Wednesday. “These men were killed while trying to build a suicide car bomb to target and kill innocent people but it killed themselves,” provincial police chief Sayed Agha Saqeb said after the blast on Tuesday. He said intelligence reports suggested the five were Taliban. Taliban militants have stepped up the use of Iraq-style suicide blasts in their anti-government insurgency over the past two years.Commander killed: Separately, a remote-controlled roadside bomb killed a former anti-Soviet militia commander and two bodyguards just outside Kandahar city on Wednesday, Saqeb said. “The bomb was remote-control and Taliban were behind it,” Saqeb added. Two policemen were killed by a similar device as they patrolled along the Pakistani border on Tuesday, a local police official said. Kandahar border police chief Mohammad Raziq blamed the bombing on the Taliban.
The Interior Ministry said this week that nearly 1,000 Afghan civilians were killed in 2007, the bloodiest year since the toppling of the Taliban regime in late 2001. Another 1,000 Afghan security forces — most of them poorly-armed and under-paid police — were killed in last year’s violence, the ministry said. More than 60,000 foreign troops, mainly in a UN-mandated NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, are based here to battle the Taliban insurgency and help train Afghan security forces.