KANDAHAR, May 4: Taliban guerrillas have killed nine government troops and five policemen as violence intensifies in Afghanistan's troubled south, Taliban officials said on Tuesday.

The Taliban fighters killed the nine soldiers in an ambush on a patrol in Kandahar province's remote district of Meya Nishin late on Monday, according to Taliban spokesman Haji Latif Hakimi.

Khalid Pashtun, a spokesman for Kandahar's governor confirmed the ambush, but said he had heard only five soldiers were killed. Doctors in neighbouring Zabul province told Reuters they had received the bullet ridden bodies of five policemen abducted on Monday in the Shah Joy district.

"We have killed the five that we kidnapped," Taliban commander Mullah Rozi Khan told Reuters. Four government soldiers were killed on Sunday in Zabul in a mine blast. Commanders of Nato forces in Kabul fear a spring offensive by Taliban militia. -Reuters