Afghan suicide blasts kill dozen

KANDAHAR (AFP) - Two suicide bombers attacked police stations in southern Afghanistan Monday, killing 10 Afghan policemen and two civilians and underlining the growing threat from a Taliban-led insurgency.
The attacks, which also wounded around 30 people, followed a deadly weekend in which nine US and European soldiers were killed along with several civilians and militants in Afghanistan's spiralling wave of extremist violence.
The most deadly was outside the provincial police headquarters in Lashkar Gah, the capital of the turbulent, opium-producing province of Helmand, with the attacker disguised as a policeman in uniform. "Eleven people, nine of them policemen and two of them civilians, were killed in a suicide bomb attack in Lashkar Gah," the interior ministry said in a statement.
Twenty-eight others, also mostly policemen, were wounded, the statement said. The provincial health department gave a similar toll.
A Taliban spokesman, Yousuf Ahmadi, said a member of his militia had carried out the attack and killed 47 policemen - a clear exaggeration.
President Hamid Karzai condemned the attack in statement that said targeting police showed that the insurgents were afraid of the growing force. The European Union, which is training the police, said it was "appalled". Monday's other suicide attack was at the police headquarters in the turbulent Delaram district of southwestern Farah province, police said.
A suicide bomber killed a policeman outside the building with a hand grenade then grabbed the dead man's weapon and ran into the compound, said the police spokesman for western Afghanistan, Abdul Rauf Ahmadi. Officers fired at the attacker and bombs strapped to his body exploded, he said. Two shopkeepers were wounded. The Taliban on Sunday claimed a blast that killed four US soldiers in the eastern province of Nangarhar hours before two British troops were killed in a blast in Helmand.