KABUL: Taliban insurgents captured 13 Afghan government soldiers on Tuesday after their helicopter crashed in territory under the militants' control, police said. Three soldiers were killed in the crash.

Sayed Aqa Saqeb, police chief for the northern province of Faryab where the transport helicopter went down, said it was not clear why it crashed.

“Now we're thinking of ways to rescue those captured by the Taliban,” Saqeb said.

An army spokesman in northern Afghanistan said he had no information about a helicopter crash.

The Taliban, fighting to expel foreign forces and bring down the US-backed government, have made gains over the past year outside their southern and eastern heartlands and into northern areas including Faryab.

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Blasts in Kabul kill six

Elsewhere in the country, a provincial director from Afghanistan's national tax office was killed by Taliban insurgents in the eastern Ghazni province, said Mohammad Ali Ahmedi, Ghazni's deputy governor.

He said that insurgents stopped the director's vehicle, dragged him out and shot him dead as he was on his way to his office.

Meanwhile in two separate blasts in the capital Kabul, six civilians were killed and six others were wounded, said Sediq Sediqqi, spokesman for the Interior Ministry.

“The first explosion happened when a pressure cooker full of explosives detonated in western part of the city, killing three civilians,” he said, adding that three other civilians were killed and six wounded in a bombing elsewhere in the city.

No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attacks.

Bombings and especially roadside bombs are a major threat to both Afghan security forces and civilians across the country.

In October two British Royal Air Force (RAF) personnel and three others died when their helicopter crashed while landing at the headquarters of the Resolute Support international Nato coalition in the Afghan capital Kabul.

While in August, at least 17 people, including 12 Afghan army soldiers, were killed in a helicopter crash in Shinkay, a district relatively free of militant activity in the otherwise volatile province of Zabul.

The Taliban claimed to have shot down the chopper with a rocket launcher, but Shinkay district chief Mohammad Qasim Khan had attributed the crash to a technical fault.