South Asia News

Blast kills British journalist, Afghan, US soldiers (Roundup)

Jan 10, 2010, 22:16 GMT

A burqa clad Afghan woman passes by US soldiers in Herat western Afghanistan on 10 January 2010. EPA/JALIL REZAYEE

Kabul - A reporter from the British weekly Sunday Mirror was among three people killed in a bomb explosion targeting a military patrol in southern Afghanistan, the British Defence Ministry said Sunday.

Rupert Hamer, a defence correspondent and Philip Coburn, a Mirror's photographer were 'embedded' with the US Marines in Nawa district of southern province of Helmand when the vehicle they were traveling in was hit by a roadside bomb, the statement said.

Hamer died in the blast on the spot, while Coburn was 'in a serious but stable condition,' it said.

'A US Marine and an Afghan soldier were also killed in the blast, and four US Marines were seriously injured,' the statement said, but did not say when the incident took place.

More than 9,000 British soldiers and thousands of US Marines are stationed in Helmand, the province that witnessed the heaviest battle between the Taliban insurgents and NATO troops in 2009.

Prior to Sunday's announcement, Reporters Without Borders had stated that a total of 19 journalists, 11 of them foreign, had been killed in Afghanistan since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States.

Meanwhile, three workers of an aid organization were killed in the neighboring province of Uruzgan when their vehicle was blown up by a roadside bomb on Sunday, the Afghan Interior Ministry said in a statement.

Two other aid workers were wounded in the blast, it said, but did not identify the victims or the aid organization.

Taliban militants rely heavily on use of roadside bombings as part of their insurgency against the Afghan government and more than 110,000 international troops in the country. The militants carried out more than 3,000 of such attacks in 2009, the record number since their ouster.