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Bomber targets governor, Canadians; kills 4 Afghans

Posted on: Sunday, 4 June 2006, 02:26 CDT

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (Reuters) - A Taliban suicide car bomber killed at least four Afghans in the southern city of Kandahar on Sunday in an attack on the provincial governor as he traveled with a convoy of Canadian troops, officials said.

Governor Assadullah Khalid survived the attack in the heart of the city, and a spokesman for the NATO-led peacekeeping force in Afghanistan said there were no casualties among the Canadian troops.

"The target of the attack was the governor," Khalid's spokesman, Dawud Ahmadi, said, adding that four people were killed and 13 wounded.

Taliban spokesman Qari Yousuf called Reuters from an undisclosed location to claim responsibility for the latest in a series of suicide attacks in Kandahar over the past few months.

Two days earlier a suicide car bomber killed three civilians and himself on a road outside the city.

The attacks come during the bloodiest phase of a Taliban-led insurgency that has raged since U.S.-led coalition forces overthrew the militants' radical Islamic government in 2001.

More than 900 people have been killed in the insurgency since the start of the year, half of them in May.

A rise in Taliban activity in the south coincides with preparations for NATO-led peacekeepers to take control of southern provinces from coalition forces, which have had a more offensive mission to hunt down Taliban and al Qaeda remnants.

Source: REUTERS

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