Five coalition troops die, official killed in Afghanistan

KABUL, Afghanistan - Five international coalition troops died yesterday, and an Afghan district official, his son and a bodyguard were assassinated in southern Afghanistan, where the Taliban are targeting people loyal to the government and its foreign partners.

Abdul Jabar Murghani, chief of Arghandab district, was driving home when a remote-controlled bomb exploded in a car parked along his route. Arghandab is the area of Kandahar province where a suicide bomber killed 56 people at a wedding party last week.

Afghan and NATO forces are ramping up security in the province to drive the Taliban from their spiritual homeland and bolster the Afghan central government's control.

Authorities said 12 Afghan police officers and six civilians have died since early Monday in attacks across the nation. The civilians were killed in two attacks, one a remote-controlled explosive that killed four people in Helmand province in the south, and the second a roadside bomb that killed two others in western Herat province, the Interior Ministry said.

President Hamid Karzai condemned the assassination of the district chief. "When Mur-ghani arrived at the scene, the bomb was detonated," he said. "The continuation of such terrorist attacks reflects a conspiracy of strangers and enemies of the Afghan people."

Nayamit Khan, an eyewitness, said the blast occurred around 5 p.m. "The explosion was so big that the car carrying the district chief was moved from one side of the road to the other," he said.

Three of the latest NATO deaths were Britons, two shot dead yesterday in separate incidents in Helmand province. The third died in a British hospital from injuries in a firefight Sunday in Helmand, according to the British government.

A U.S. service member was killed yesterday in a gun battle in eastern Afghanistan, said Col. Wayne Shanks, a spokesman for U.S. forces.

A Polish soldier also was killed Tuesday.