Apr 12, 2010, 15:52 GMT
Kandahar, Afghanistan - Four Afghan police officers were killed and two injured on Monday when their vehicle was hit by a roadside bomb in the northern province of Faryab, police said.
Mohammad Aslam, spokesman for the provincial police chief, blamed Taliban militants for the attack, which was a rare occurrence in the comparatively peaceful northern region.
It came on the same day that over 200 people took to the streets in southern Afghanistan to protest against the killing of four civilians by NATO forces in the region.
NATO-led troops in Kandahar province had opened fire on a bus on Monday morning, killing four civilians and injuring 18 others, Zalmai Ayoubi, a spokesman for the provincial governor, said. The shooting took place on a highway in Kandahar's Zherai district.
Following the attack, more than 200 men blocked the main road linking Kandahar city to the western province of Herat and chanted anti-American slogans, witnesses said.
'This is the not the first time that they killed our innocent countrymen,' Abdul Ghafoor, one of the protesters, told the German Press Agency dpa. 'They don't care about the lives of the ordinary people.'
The protesters burnt tyres and called on the Afghan government to bring the shooters to justice, Abdul Matin, a Kandahar resident, said.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai 'strongly condemned' the shooting and said in a statement issued by his office that 'opening fire on a passenger bus is against NATO's commitment to protecting the lives of civilians and is by no means justifiable.'
The NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said in a statement that it 'deeply regrets the tragic loss of life.'
One woman was among the four killed, it said, adding that five injured civilians were treated at the scene, while 13 others were taken to local hospitals with minor injuries.
The bus approached an ISAF route-clearance patrol from the rear at high speed and did not heed flashlight and flare warnings by the NATO forces, the ISAF said, adding that following the shooting the forces discovered the vehicle to be a passenger bus.
Jeff Loftin, an ISAF spokesman in Kabul, said that an Afghan and ISAF assessment team had arrived in the province to investigate the incident.
Civilian casualties at the hands of international troops in the country have long been a major source of friction between the Afghan government and more than 120,000 NATO troops currently stationed in Afghanistan.
NATO commander in Afghanistan, US General Stanley McChrystal, has put protecting civilians at the centrepiece of his war strategy in the country. The number of Afghan civilians killed during the NATO operation has significantly reduced since McChrystal's appointment more than a year ago.
More than 2,400 civilians were killed in Afghanistan last year, but a majority of them died in Taliban-led attacks, according to the United Nations.
Hours after the shooting, three armed Taliban fighters equipped with suicide vests attacked a government building in the centre of Kandahar city on Monday.
A provincial police official told dpa that least one of the bombers detonated his explosives near the intelligence service's office, while two others were killed in an exchange of fire with security forces.
The militants occupied an empty girls' school near the spy agency's headquarters in the city, from where they tossed hand grenades and fired rockets at the building, he said.
Karzai condemned the attack in a separate statement issued by the presidential palace. The statement said that one teacher and two intelligence agents were injured in the attack.
Kandahar, once the headquarters of the Taliban's fugitive leader Mullah Mohammad Omar, and the birthplace of the Islamic movement, is at the centre of the Afghan and NATO offensive this year.
Combined Afghan and NATO forces are building up for an operation in the province, which is regarded as the spiritual home of the Taliban militants in the volatile region.
The offensive is expected to get a big boost in the summer, when thousands of extra US troops are due to arrive in the region.
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