KHOST: A suicide attack in southeastern Afghanistan killed six guards working for a road construction company, while Nato forces killed 15 Taliban insurgents elsewhere, officials said.

A suicide bomber detonated an explosives-laden vehicle at the Sky construction company in the Jadran district of Paktia province, local governor Abdul Wali Jadran told AFP.

‘Six security guards of the company were killed and another three were wounded in the blast,’ Jadran said.

Separately, Nato and Afghan soldiers killed a Taliban commander and 11 of his men in an overnight operation in western Herat province, said Jalandar Shah Behnam, the Afghan army corp commander for western Afghanistan.

The operation was launched after a tip-off about the whereabouts of the hideout of Ghulam Yahya Akbari, who he described as a local Taliban commander.

‘The joint forces killed Akbari and his men in a firefight. We were supported by Nato helicopters but no air strike was needed,’ he said.

Akbari was a former anti-Soviet fighter who served as Herat major before the Taliban took over the country, after which he joined the anti-Taliban resistance from 1996 until they were overthrown in a US-led invasion in 2001.

He was director of public works for the province in the years immediately following the Taliban’s overthrow, but turned against the government three years ago.

In another operation, three militants were killed in a clash that erupted after insurgents attacked a joint Afghan police and Swedish Nato forces patrol in Chahar Bolak district of northern Balkh province, the deputy provincial police chief said.

Eight years after the Taliban regime was ousted, the militants are spreading their web from their southern power base to the relatively peaceful north and west of the country.— AFP