12 January 2004	Monday	19 Ziqa'ad 1424

KANDAHAR, Jan 11: Five Afghan soldiers and four Taliban have been killed in two separate explosions in southern Afghanistan, officials said on Sunday.

Five Afghan soldiers were killed and three injured on Saturday in an attack by Taliban in the frontier district of Sharawak near the border with Pakistan, the military commander of the province, General Khan Mohammad, said.

An unknown number of attackers had crossed the border to carry out their operation and escaped back into Pakistan later, the general alleged.

In the province of Helmand four Taliban were killed when the bomb they were building exploded as they worked on it. "Yesterday four Taliban who were preparing a bomb, a remote-controlled bomb in a pressure cooker, were killed when the bomb went off," Helmand police chief Abdul Rahman Sabir said on Saturday.

"The investigation is going on. We have the bodies but we don't know yet whether they are all Afghans; we will be able to tell you their identity after we finish the investigation."

The explosion destroyed the room in which the men were working in the Sangin district of the province, some 490 km from Kabul. Southern and southeastern Afghanistan have of late experienced an increased number of militant attacks and kid-nappings, the most violent being a bomb explosion in the southern city of Kandahar last Tuesday which killed 15 people and injured scores with most of the victims children.-AFP