Taliban militants overran a southern Afghan town where a peace agreement had been negotiated last fall, disarming police, burning the government compound and threatening elders, officials and a resident said today.

The new governor of Afghanistan’s largest opium-producing province today said he supports a US-backed plan to spray herbicide on lucrative poppy fields, and that he will ask Taliban fighters to support the government.

A rocket exploded in a packed school near a US-led coalition base in eastern Afghanistan today, killing seven children and wounding 34 other people, officials said.

A roadside bombing today in eastern Afghanistan killed four American troops, the US military said.

A second member of a US special operations team missing since last week has been located in a house in remote eastern Afghanistan and is wounded, the provincial governor said today, a day after another US soldier was rescued in the same area.

At least 16 people, many of them children, were killed in explosions at the office of a US security contractor in Afghanistan’s capital and a school in the south east as the country moves towards its first post-Taliban election.

A powerful explosion wrecked an office of an American security house in Kabul today, killing up to six people, officials said.

An explosion ripped through a school in south-eastern Afghanistan, killing nine children and one adult, the United States military said today.

Concerns persist about security at Afghanistan’s borders and terrorists’ infiltration of the country, US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said today.

Wafa Idris, the Palestinian’s first female suicide bomber who blew herself up at the weekend, was a former volunteer paramedic who had been hit three times by Israeli rubber bullets.