KANDAHAR, Afghanistan, Aug 2, (Agencies): A suicide car bomber blew himself up next to a police truck bringing a southern Afghan official to work early Monday, killing six children nearby, officials said.
The blast went off at about 9 a.m. local time near a market area in Dand district to the west of Kandahar city, according to the official who was targeted — district government chief Ahmadullah Nazak.
“I dropped down. Then I heard a second explosion,” Nazak said. “It hit our car, but it didn’t injure me.” The Interior Ministry originally said five children were killed in the blast, and Nazak said a sixth had died by early afternoon.

A bodyguard who was driving with Nazak was wounded, he said.
No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack, though it fits the pattern of Taleban attacks targeting government officials in the south. As additional US forces have poured into southern Taleban strongholds in Kandahar and Helmand provinces, insurgents have mounted a counter-campaign of bombings and assassinations aimed at those affiliated with the Afghan government.
Militants attacked a second government official in the east the same day. The convoy of a presidential adviser was hit by a remote-controlled bomb hidden in a rickshaw as it was driving through Jalalabad city, said Ghafar Khan, a police spokesman in Nangarhar province. The adviser — Wahidullah Sabaoun — was wounded but not seriously, Khan said.

In eastern Nuristan province, Nato and Afghan troops attacked two villages that had been held by Taleban fighters, killing more than 30 insurgents as they secured the Bachancha and Badmuk villages, Nato said in a statement. Two Afghan soldiers were killed, Nato said.
Afghan officials in Nuristan corroborated the account.
The attacks were part of an ongoing effort to secure the area around the village of Barg-e-Matal which has shuttled between government and insurgent control in recent months.
Elsewhere, coalition and Afghan troops arrested a senior commander of the Haqqani group, an al-Qaeda-linked wing of the Taleban based in neighboring Pakistan, the Nato-led command said in a statement.
The commander, whose name was not released, was apprehended in Khost province along with “several” suspected insurgents and was believed to be planning attacks in connection with the Sept 18 parliamentary elections, the statement added.

Meanwhile, a senior adviser to President Hamid Karzai was badly wounded in a bomb attack Monday as he travelled in eastern Afghanistan, a provincial spokesman told AFP.
Wahidullah Sabaoun, adviser on tribal affairs to the president, was on a personal visit in Jalalabad, the capital of Nangarhar province, when a bomb placed in a rickshaw exploded and hit his vehicle.
The blast wounded the adviser and a tribal elder travelling with him, along with five civilians near their vehicle, said spokesman Ahmad Zia Abdulzai.
“Sabaoun’s wounds are not critical and he’s in a stable condition in hospital,” said Abdulzai.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack.
The Kabul-based Sabaoun, who has been advising Karzai for more than four years, was once intelligence chief of Hizb-e-Islami, the largest anti-Soviet resistance group of the Cold War.

In another report, Sweden’s government on Monday said it would be open to extending the mission of its 500 troops serving in Afghanistan and could send more soldiers to the country if it wins the September 19 election.
“The (government) alliance wants to extend the mission of the Swedish force in Afghanistan and is open to an increase of the military contribution if the safety situation requires it,” Defence Minister Sten Tolgfors wrote in Dagens Nyheter, a leading Swedish daily.
“We see our participation the international crisis management missions under popular mandate as an expression of solidarity and responsibility of Sweden in the world,” he said in a text which was also signed by the defence spokespeople of the three other parties in power.

One of the first decisions to be taken by the newly elected parliament after the Septe 19 election is to decide if it will continue or not the mandate of its troops in Afghanistan.
Some 500 Swedish troops are currently posted in the North of Afghanistan, serving in the Nato-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).
Swedish troops were sent to the country in early 2002, even though Sweden is officially neutral and not a member of Nato.
The Swedish opposition coalition, made up of the Social-Democrat, Left and Green parties, is divided on the presence of Swedish troops in Afghanistan and has not yet said what it would do if it wins the election, but said it would clarify its position before the vote.