The New Nation - Internet Edition

AFP, Kabul

Six children were killed in a bomb explosion in Afghanistan Sunday while a suicide car bomb blew up a marked United Nations vehicle and killed two Afghan doctors and a driver, officials said.

Authorities meanwhile reported that seven policemen were dead after Taliban militants attacked a remote district centre on Saturday, the same day a British soldier was killed in a bomb blast in the troubled south.

The bloodshed comes amid growing concern over deteriorating security, seven years after a US-led invasion ended the Taliban regime, with top-level talks on rising extremist attacks due in London and Washington due in the coming days.

The children were killed when a bomb they were playing with exploded in a village in the central province of Ghazni, Andar district governor Abdul Rahim Daisiwal told AFP. Around a dozen more children were wounded in the blast and some are in a critical condition, he said, adding it appeared the bomb had been planted and was not one left over from countries decades of war.

Some of the wounded children had been transferred to an international military base for treatment, the NATO-led force headquarters in Kabul said. The Taliban, behind a wave of unrest, denied involvement in the bomb blast.

But the insurgents did claim responsibility for a suicide car bombing that ripped through the southeastern town of Spin Boldak, hitting a vehicle of UN staff on a mission to monitor efforts to vaccinate children against polio.

Afghan doctors Mamoon Tahiri and Shamsulhaque Kakar were killed outright in the explosion, the Afghan health ministry said in a statement. A driver died in hospital from his injuries, it said.