Karzai's brother survives attack

KABUL (AFP) - A younger brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai said he survived an assassination attempt Monday when gunmen sprayed his convoy with rocket and machine-gun fire, killing one of his bodyguards.
Ahmad Wali Karzai - who heads the provincial council in flashpoint southern Kandahar - said the heavily armed attackers ambushed his convoy as it headed down a highway near the capital Kabul.
We were driving to Kabul. All of a sudden we were attacked from the mountains by rockets and PK machine-guns, Karzai told AFP. My car was in the lead, my bodyguards were driving in a separate car just behind me which was hit. One of my bodyguards was hit and later died, he said.
The politician, whom the US media has accused of involvement in Afghanistans lucrative drugs trade, said he was returning to Kabul from talks in the eastern city of Jalalabad with dozens of tribal elders from Kandahar.
It was not immediately clear who was behind the attack.
Meanwhile, a series of bomb blasts killed six police officers and two soldiers in southern Afghanistan on Monday.
Five policemen were killed when a roadside bomb similar to those used by Taliban insurgents battling the government tore through their vehicle in the province of Zabul, provincial police chief Abdul Rahman Sarjang said.
A separate bombing elsewhere in the restive province killed another police officer, he told AFP.
In one explosion in Naw Bahar district we lost five police. In another explosion near Qalat we lost another police officer, Sarjang said, referring to the capital of Zabul province.
The district chief of Naw Bahar said that two Afghan National Army soldiers were killed in a third bomb blast in the area on Monday.
There was a roadside explosion, he told AFP.
An EU commissioner announced Monday that French MEP and former general Philippe Morillon will head an EU observer mission at the Afghan presidential election in August.