Coalition strikes kill 9 Afghan cops

HERAT (AFP) - Nine policemen were killed in Afghanistan Sunday in international military airstrikes called in when police and troops clashed after mistaking each other for Taliban, authorities said.
The fighting erupted at about 1:30 am when Afghan and international soldiers moved into a district without informing police, who thought they were militants, the Deputy Governor of southwestern Farah province said.
“An engagement took place, each side thinking the other was the Taliban,” Muhammad Younus Rasouli told AFP.
The troops called for air support and military attack aircraft arrived and bombed a police post, he said. “Nine police were killed and five wounded,” he said.
The US-led coalition, helping the government fight Taliban and other extremists, said the combined Afghan and US patrol had been acting in self-defence after coming under attack from a “non-uniformed hostile force.”
Rasouli said the police chief of Farah’s Anar Dara district, on the border with Iran, was among the wounded and was in a serious condition.
Nato’s International Security Assistance Force said meanwhile its soldiers had killed four Afghan civilians by accident late Saturday when mortar rounds landed off-target in the eastern province of Paktika near Pakistan.
One of the mortars landed on a house, Afghan authorities in the area said.
In other violence Sunday, three children were killed in the southern province of Helmand when a bomb blew up a minivan, provincial police chief Muhammad Hussien Andiwal said. Two children and two adults were wounded.
The Afghan police and Defence Ministry announced meanwhile that about 15 Taliban were killed in various incidents in southern Afghanistan.