The New Nation - Internet Edition

BSS, Dhaka

Taliban-linked militants ambu-shed a police patrol in the troubled southern Afghanistan Thursday, killing seven men, a police commander said.

The victims were killed in the troubled southern province of Zabul where a day earlier US-led troops and Afghan security forces killed "several" Taliban fighters, according to police and the US-led coalition.

"One of our highway police patrols was attacked by Taliban today (Thursday). We lost seven policemen," the Zabul highway police chief, Abdul Mohammad, told AFP. A police vehicle hit by a rocket was also destroyed, he added.

Taliban spokesman Yousuf Ahmadi, phoning AFP from an unknown location, claimed credit for the attack, saying dozens of Taliban fighters carried out the ambush in Zabul's Shahjoy district.

A day earlier, several Taliban fighters were killed and nearly a dozen others were detained in a joint US and Afghan operation in the same province, the coalition said in a statement.

The statement did not provide details or the number of rebel casualties.

Attacks such as Thursday's happen almost daily in southern and eastern Afghanistan, where the Taliban, the key militant group behind a bloody insurgency, are most active.

The insurgency, launched months after the Taliban's 2001 ouster from power in a US-led invasion, has reached its highest level with the rebels often employing fairly sophisticated insurgent tactics such as suicide bombings.

A suicide blast this week killed more than 50 people, including six parliament deputies, outside the northern town of Pul-i-Khumri some 150 kilometers (90 miles) north of capital, Kabul.

It was the deadliest suicide attack of the Taliban-led insurgency.