Afghan officials claim US airstrike kills 10 police

President Hamid Karzai condemned a US airstrike that Afghan officials claimed killed 10 border policemen today.

Sixteen other people died in violence throughout the country, including an American soldier killed by a Soviet-era land mine.

The US military said it was investigating the airstrike in southeastern Afghanistan but believed it struck two trucks driven by insurgents fleeing the scene of a militant attack on US and Afghan troops.

Two suicide bombers also targeted US and Nato soldiers, seriously wounding one American soldier and killing an Afghan civilian. The Taliban said it would launch more such attacks in the future.

Gunmen briefly kidnapped 17 health workers in southern Afghanistan but released them safely later today, Nato said.

Afghanistan is going through its worst period of violence since the US-led invasion that ousted the hard-line Taliban regime in late 2001 for hosting Osama bin Laden.

Karzai said he was “shocked and angered” by the airstrike in the Turwa area of southeastern Paktika province.

“I have repeatedly asked the coalition forces to take maximum caution while carrying out operations and I want that incidents like this must not be repeated,” he said in a statement.

General Abdul Rahman, Afghanistan’s deputy chief of border police, said a coalition airplane killed 10 policemen in two trucks. The policemen’s bodies were taken to Sharan, the capital of Paktika province. No one survived the strike.

The US military released a statement saying it was looking into the report. But it believed an aircraft had destroyed two trucks that soldiers on the ground claimed were involved in an insurgent attack on a US-Afghan patrol. An Afghan policeman was killed and coalition vehicle damaged in that clash.

Karzai has urged restraint several times from coalition forces operating in areas where civilians live. In April, clashes pitting US, Canadian and British troops against insurgents left 13 Afghan civilians dead.

In Paktika province yesterday, a US military vehicle hit a Soviet-era land mine, killing one soldier, the military said. Enemy action was ruled out.

A suicide bomber drove an explosives-packed car into a joint US-Afghan army convoy on the main Kandahar-Kabul highway in Kandahar province today, seriously wounding one US soldier, officials said. The bomber died and an armoured Humvee was damaged.

A purported Taliban spokesman claimed responsibility for the attack and said the bomber was Afghan.

Militants will continue with “suicide bombings, guerrilla warfare and ambushes” against the US and their allies in Afghanistan, said Taliban spokesman Qari Yousaf Ahmadi, who contacted The Associated Press by telephone.

In nearby Uruzgan province, another suicide bomber targeting a Nato patrol instead killed one civilian and wounded six others, a Nato spokesman said.

But the Afghan Interior Ministry said eight police were wounded, four seriously, in an attack by a bomber wearing explosives strapped to his body.

In eastern Paktiya province, an airstrike in the mountainous Mutrekh village killed three people and wounded four late on Tuesday, the provincial police chief said. But the US military denied any coalition bombing activity in the area.

US soldiers also killed eight militants during a firefight near eastern Kunar province’s capital of Asadabad, a coalition statement said.

Suspected Taliban militants released 17 health workers unharmed, including doctors and nurse, who had been abducted earlier today in southern Kandahar province, said Nato spokesman Major Quentin Innis.

Taliban spokesman Ahmadi said insurgents did commandeer the workers’ minivan used by the health workers but did not kidnap the people, who he claimed fled into the nearby villages.