KHOST, Afghanistan, Feb 18, (AFP): A Taleban suicide car bomber struck a district police headquarters in Afghanistan on Friday, killing nine people and wounding 40 others near the Pakistani border, officials said.
It was the second major attack in a week on Afghan police, who alongside a fledgling army, are due to take control of security from US-led NATO troops by the end of 2014 to allow the bulk of Western forces to withdraw.
Public health official Amir Badsha Mangal said nine people were killed and 40 others injured, four of them seriously, in the attack in the eastern city of Khost.
Local police chief Abdul Hakim Eshaqzai said that one policeman as well as women and children were among the dead.
Hospitals in the city have been “overwhelmed” by the influx of wounded, he added, warning: “The casualty toll will possibly increase.”
The incident came on the day that two international troops serving in Afghanistan were killed in separate incidents. In northern Afghanistan’s Baghlan province, one soldier — reported by media in Berlin to be German — was killed and several others were injured when a man wearing an Afghan National Army uniform shot at them at a base.
Another soldier whose nationality has not been confirmed was killed by a bomb blast in southern Afghanistan.

The current death toll for foreign troops this year in Afghanistan stands at 47, according to independent website iCasualties.org. Last year was the bloodiest yet for the international force, with 711 deaths.
Following the Khost blast, an AFP reporter said blood and body parts littered the road near the scene and that nearby windows in a busy civilian area had been shattered.
Pieces of human flesh were flung up to 50 metres (yards) from the blast spot, indicating the explosion was a strong one, the reporter said. Taleban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told AFP that the Islamist militia, which has battled international forces and the Western-backed government in Afghanistan since being ousted in by a 2001 US-led invasion, was responsible.
“The bomber has attacked the second police district (of Khost) headquarters and has also destroyed four police vehicles in the attack,” he said.
President Hamid Karzai, whose government depends on Western support to fight the Taleban, said the “act of horror” proved that “terrorists are hostile to the innocent people of Afghanistan and want them to live in a state of fear.”
The Taleban have frequently targeted Afghan police in their nine-year campaign against Karzai’s government.
Last Saturday, 19 people including 15 police and an intelligence agent died when suicide bombers armed with guns, grenades and car bombs targeted the police headquarters in Afghanistan’s de facto southern capital, Kandahar.
Kandahar is the birthplace of the Taleban and although the south sees much of the worst fighting, US-led NATO and Afghan forces are also locked in an intense fight with insurgents in the east.
Last month, 13 civilians were killed by a roadside bomb in Paktika province, in eastern Afghanistan.
Paktika and Khost both border Pakistan, where the Taleban and other allied Islamist networks keep rear bases that Washington wants the Pakistani military to destroy to help suffocate the insurgency in Afghanistan.
In 2009, Khost was the scene of the worst attack on the CIA since 1983 when eight people were killed by a suicide bomber who was reportedly a triple agent.
There are currently around 140,000 international troops in Afghanistan fighting the Taleban.