KABUL, Afghanistan, Dec 12, (AP): A suicide attacker detonated a minibus packed with explosives near the gates of a military base in southern Afghanistan on Sunday, killing six NATO troops and two Afghan soldiers, officials said. Afghan officials said the attack took place in the Zhari district of Kandahar province, where the US poured in troops this summer as part of a surge of forces to try to oust the Taleban from its southern strongholds. Gen Abdul Hamid, the Afghan army chief for the province, said the attacker drove a minibus into the entrance of the base Sunday morning just as vehicles were preparing to move out on a patrol. “They were leaving the compound and at that moment, the minibus attacked and they hit right at the entrance of the base,” Hamid said.

Taleban spokesman Qari Yousuf Ahmadi claimed responsibility for the attack, saying the insurgent group was retaliating for all the attacks launched on them in the area in recent months. NATO said only that the service members had been killed in an insurgent attack and declined to identify their nationalities. Most NATO troops in the south are American. More than 670 international troops have been killed so far this year, well above the 502 killed in the whole of 2009. Sunday’s attack was the second incident in two weeks to kill so many service members. On Nov 29, an Afghan policeman turned his gun on his American trainers in the east, killing six of them before he was gunned down. The Taleban claimed that they had sent him to join the police as a sleeper agent. Before that, five US soldiers were killed in a Nov 14 insurgent attack on their unit in eastern Afghanistan. Also Sunday, NATO said a joint NATO-Afghan force killed a Taleban leader and captured a key member of another militant group in the east.

The Taleban leader was involved in weapons smuggling and attacks in eastern Wardak province, according to a statement. NATO identified him only by his first name, Fedahi.
The head of Afghanistan’s election commission warned Sunday that a push by the attorney general to challenge the results of September’s parliamentary vote could spark a national crisis.
Final results from the Sept 18 vote were announced on Dec 1 but uncertainty has continued to surround the poll because of charges by Attorney Gen Mohammad Ishaq Alako that votes were bought and sold to such an extent that the results could be invalid.
Many had hoped the vote would prove a success story for the government of President Hamid Karzai after a fraud-marred presidential poll hurt his credibility last year. Instead, the latest vote has been just as mired in allegations of fraud and state-sanctioned cheating.
Alako, a presidential appointee, has sent a letter to the Supreme Court asking it to annul the results of the latest election and issue sentences against 14 top officials who organized the vote and oversaw fraud investigations, according to Rahmatullah Nazari, the deputy attorney general.
“We have demanded that the Supreme Court cancel the results of the election,” Nazari told Afghanistan’s Tolo TV in an interview aired late Saturday.