Four people including a district chief have been killed in a roadside bombing in an area of northern Afghanistan that has been largely peaceful until now.

An Afghan court today found a communist-era intelligence chief guilty of ordering hundreds of killings and sentenced him to death by shooting.

A massive explosion at a weapons dump near an airfield in northern Afghanistan killed five Afghans and two German soldiers, officials said today.

Calling Ahmed Shah Massood their battlefield enemy, the hard-line Islamic Taliban denied they were behind a suicide bombing that has critically injured the opposition leader.