Violence returns to Afghanistan after election lull

Six people, including three children and two US soldiers, were reported killed in Afghanistan, a week after millions voted in a landmark election meant to help bring peace back to their war-ravaged nation.

The children and a policeman died in a bomb explosion on Friday in southeastern Afghanistan, witnesses said yesterday.

Two US troops were killed and three wounded by a bomb on Thursday, a US military spokesman said yesterday.

The reports of fresh violence came as vote-counting in the presidential election resumed after a break on Friday to mark the start of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

A high turnout in last week's poll, which President Hamid Karzai is expected to win, was celebrated as a turning point in Afghanistan's political transition to some sort of democracy.

The absence of significant attacks by Taliban fighters and their Islamic militant allies in the weeks before the vote was seen as a success for US, Afghan and NATO-led forces.

Witnesses said the three children had gathered round a truck set ablaze by suspected militants in the Asmar area of Kunar province. The militants detonated a bomb by remote control soon after a local police chief arrived to investigate.

"One of the police chief's bodyguards was killed on the spot along with three children who had gathered in the area to see the fire," said one resident.

The two US troops were killed by a bomb while out on patrol in the southcentral Uruzgan province. They were the first US soldiers to die in Afghanistan since last week's election.

The attack in Uruzgan, the home province of fugitive Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar, brought the number of US personnel killed in Afghanistan to 102 since an operation to drive out the Taliban and al Qaeda was launched in late 2001.

In Kabul yesterday evening, a rocket struck a Soviet-era apartment block near the international airport. A woman walking in a lane below was wounded, according to police, but a family of five escaped unhurt when the rocket ploughed into their laundry room on the sixth floor.

The capital has come under sporadic attack from rockets and mortars since the Taliban were ousted, but residents' greatest fear is of car bombs as the rockets are generally inaccurate. (Reuters)

More than 1,000 people, combatants, aid and election workers, and Afghan men, women and children have been killed in the last year as the Taliban and its allies stepped up their campaign of violence in an effort to disrupt the poll.

Allegations of voting irregularities took some of the shine off the October 9 poll.

Rivals had threatened to refuse to recognise the result until the election commission eased their concerns by establishing a three-member panel to investigate voter fraud.

Election commission officials said it could take a week to 10 days before results showed reliable trends.