Roadside bombs claim 10 lives in Kabul

Roadside bombs in have killed ten civilians, including three Nato soldiers and least three women and a child.

KABUL: Roadside bombs in Afghanistan killed ten civilians, including  three Nato soldiers and least three women and a child, police said on Tuesday.

Two Nato soldiers were killed in an attack in eastern Afghanistan, a troubled region which sees regular Taliban attacks, the force said in a statement. Another died in a similar attack on Tuesday, in the west of the country.

The nationalities of the casualties were not disclosed according to Nato policy.

Most of the troops in eastern Afghanistan are Americans, while an Italian contingent is based in the western province of Herat. The latest deaths took to 436 the number of international soldiers killed in Afghanistan since the start of the year, compared to 520 for the whole of 2009, according to an AFP count based on that kept by the icasualties.org website.

There are close to 150,000 troops in Afghanistan in a US-led Nato force fighting to shore up Afghanistan's fledgling government and fight a Taliban-led insurgency, raging since the Islamists were thrown from power in late 2001.

In another incident a remote-controlled bomb on a motorcycle parked on a bridge in southern Ghazni city detonated prematurely on Tuesday, killing two passers-by and wounding another five, including two children, police told AFP.

The blast took place just as a police convoy was about to pass, said Mohammad Osman, commander of Afghanistan's southeastern police zone.

"Two civilians were martyred and another five were wounded," he said.

The bomber had been planning to trigger the device by remote control and was injured in the explosion and had been arrested, Osman said.

In a similar incident late Monday, a roadside bomb ripped through a civilian vehicle in Shindand district, in the western province of Herat, killing five civilians and injuring two, said Lal Mohammad Omarzai, the district chief.

"Three women, a man and a child were killed and two other women were hurt," he said.

Omarzai blamed the attack on "enemies of Afghanistan", a term used to refer to Taliban militants who have waged an increasingly bloody insurgency against Afghan and Nato forces since they were pushed out of power in late 2001.