KHOST: Two powerful blasts shook Afghanistan’s southeastern town of Khost on Monday and killed at least six civilians, provincial officials said.

More than 30 other civilians were wounded in the blasts, provincial public health chief Amir Padshah Rahmatzai.

One of the explosions went off outside the province’s power department, Khost police chief Abdul Qayoum Baqizoi told a Reuters reporter in the town.

‘We do not know at this stage whether the blasts were suicide bomb attacks or bomb explosions,’ he said.

The blasts came hours after a Taliban suicide bomber killed three Afghan soldiers in southern Kandahar province.

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack on the soldiers as they patrolled the highway that goes through Kandahar’s troubled Zhari district to the western city of Herat.

‘A suicide attacker rode a motorbike filled with explosives into one of our patrols this morning,’ Sher Mohammad Zazai, an army general in southern Afghanistan, told AFP.

‘Three of our soldiers were martyred and four others were injured.’ The district chief of Zhari confirmed the incident, adding that two female civilians were also wounded in the bombing.

‘There was a suicide bombing against an ANA (Afghan National Army) convoy earlier today. Three soldiers were killed,’ Niaz Mohammad Sarhadi said.

Taliban spokesman Yousuf Ahmadi called AFP from an unknown location to claim responsibility for the bombing.

‘We carried out the attack,’ the rebel spokesman said.

Taliban guerrillas have carried out a number of raids against government offices and bases of foreign forces this year in Khost, which lies close to the border with Pakistan and is separated from other parts of Afghanistan by mountains.

Last month, militants targeted government buildings in the town with suicide bombings and seized hostages in a day of violence in which 11 insurgents and nine other people were killed. The following day, a suicide bomber killed seven civilians at a NATO base near the town.

Violence has surged to its highest level in recent years in Afghanistan where the al Qaeda-backed Taliban, ousted in a US-led invasion in 2001, have made a comeback.

In the face of spreading Taliban raids, Washington, which has called Afghanistan its top foreign policy priority, is more than doubling its force in the country from 32,000 at the beginning of this year to an expected 68,000 by the year’s end.

There are now about 57,000 US troops in the country, along with about 33,000 from other Western countries.

US commanders say insurgent attacks are already at their highest since the Taliban were toppled, and they expect violence to rise in coming months as additional troops deploy ahead of a presidential election in August. —Agencies