Pilot killed as helicopter shot at in Afghanistan

A pilot was killed and two passengers badly wounded in Afghanistan yesterday when a gunman fired on a helicopter carrying employees of a US firm.

A senior official from the ousted Taliban militia, fighting a bloody insurgency against foreign interests and aid workers in Afghanistan, claimed responsibility for the attack near the southern city of Kandahar.

According to the US embassy, the helicopter was about to take off at around 10.30 a.m. (0600 GMT) when an unidentified assailant opened fire with an AK-47 automatic rifle.

The pilot died on the scene. A security guard and a supervisor were seriously hurt, while a second security guard escaped injury. The US statement did not give the pilot's nationality.

The British embassy said the wounded security guard was a Briton. A US embassy spokesman said earlier that one of the injured was a US woman. All four worked for the Louis Berger Group Inc and had been inspecting the construction of a health clinic. Louis Berger is overseeing the renovation of the Kabul-Kandahar highway, the largest reconstruction project in Afghanistan since the Taliban was ousted by US-led forces in late 2001 for sheltering al Qaeda fighters.

The route, plagued by attacks and kidnappings blamed on the hardline Islamic Taliban, is seen by President Hamid Karzai as a symbol of the importance of international support and reconstruction to stabilise his volatile Central Asian state.