Bicycle blast kills 10 in Afghanistan

Kandahar - A bicycle bomb killed at least 10 people, most of them children, in this southern city Tuesday, underlining the violence still plaguing Afghanistan two years after the fall of the Taliban.

The blast left a street near a military base in eastern Kandahar strewn with wrecked bicycles, victims' blood and shattered glass from a passing truck, an Associated Press reporter at the scene said.

Eight of the dead were children, aged 7-15, who had been playing on a patch of waste ground on the side of the street, Deputy Police Chief Salim Khan told The Associated Press.

The truck driver and a male passer-by also died, while 23 others were injured, he said.

A soldier, Amanullah Popolzai, said authorities arrested a man spotted running away from the scene shortly before the explosion. The man, who appeared to be an Afghan, was caught trying to hide in a nearby home.

"This was the work of the Taliban. The man looked like he was a Talib fighter," Popolzai said.

The U.S. military has its southern headquarters in the city, a former Taliban stronghold, and dozens of Afghan and American soldiers immediately swarmed into the area, sealing it off.

Khan said the man had been taken to an Afghan military headquarters just 100 yards from the scene for interrogation, but had no further information.

He said another bomb had also detonated nearby a few minutes earlier, causing no injuries.

Southern and eastern Afghanistan have been plagued with a stream of shootings, kidnappings and bomb blasts against civilians as well as soldiers, many of the them claimed by Taliban.

The violence threatens the timetable for national elections supposed to take place in the summer, and has all but halted badly needed rebuilding across a huge swath of the country along the Pakistani border.

Kandahar, the focus of an ambitious U.S. plan to deploy hundreds of troops and civilian reconstruction workers in the run-up to the vote, has seen several attacks.

On Monday night, gunmen attacked the office of the United Nations (news - web sites) refugee agency in Kandahar, throwing a grenade and firing shots but causing no injuries.

A bomb ripped through a bustling bazaar in the city a month ago, wounding 20 Afghans.

Three days earlier, on Dec. 3, two U.S. soldiers were wounded when a suspected member of the Taliban threw a grenade at their parked vehicle in a Kandahar square.

The latest bombing comes two days after a constitutional loya jirga, or grand council, meeting in Kabul ratified a charter supposed to underpin a new state strong enough to put an end to a quarter-century of fighting.

But the three-week convention was marred by an ugly ethnic split, complicating U.N. efforts to disarm regional warlords, who frequently fight each other, in order to ensure the voting is fair.

In the latest factional fighting police said a senior commander in Zabul province, just to the northeast of Kandahar, was shot and killed Monday by security forces loyal to the governor.

The United States is training a new Afghan National Army to curb the warlords. But only about 7,000 soldiers — out of an eventual force of 70,000 — have been deployed.

The 11,000-strong American military force still depends heavily on local militias as it pursues Taliban and al-Qaida guerrillas in the south and east.  -- Associated Press

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