Suicide car bomber kills 5 police in Afghanistan

A suicide car bomb attack and a separate blast at a checkpost in Afghanistan killed at least seven policemen on Thursday, officials said. In the first, a suicide bomber rammed an Afghan police checkpost killing at least five policemen and wounding six others in the southern province of Kandahar, an official said. The attacker drove his explosives-laden car into the checkpoint at the district police headquarters of Arghistan district, provincial governor spokesman Jawed Faisal told AFP. “Five policemen were martyred and six others injured in this cowardly attack,” Faisal said. Kandahar is the largest city in southern Afghanistan and the birthplace of the Taliban, who have been waging a bloody insurgency since being ousted from power by the U.S.-led invasion in late 2001 that followed the 9/11 attacks. In the second incident, an explosion at a police checkpost in the capital of eastern Nangarhar province killed at least two policemen. Nangarhar (East) provincial governor spokesman Ahmad Zia Abdulzai confirmed the incident, but said security forces were still investigating the cause of the blast. Militants frequently target Afghan police and military, who are due to assume responsibility for the country’s security from NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) by the end of 2014. The attacks come weeks after the Taliban announced their “spring offensive”, a campaign of bombings and attacks that picks up every year as weather conditions improve. There are presently 130,000 U.S.-led NATO forces fighting the Taliban-led insurgency.