MAZAR-I-SHARIF, Oct 30: One of four men arrested for an attack that killed a British soldier in northern Aghanistan is a Pakistani who had arrived in the country just days earlier, police said on Sunday.

Gunmen opened fire on a vehicle carrying British soldiers serving with the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in the main northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif on Saturday, killing one and wounding five.

An Afghan interpreter was also wounded in the attack on an unmarked ISAF vehicle near the city’s famous Blue Mosque.

Three of the men detained after the attack were Afghans but a fourth said he was a Pakistani national who had only entered Afghanistan a few days before the ambush, Mazar-i-Sharif police spokesman Shirgan Dorani told AFP.

The man had said he had trained at a religious school, in Pakistan, Dorani said.

The attackers opened fire on the ISAF car from a motorbike and a car, witnesses said. Some of them fled on foot and were captured by onlookers.

The injured soldiers had been evacuated to the capital Kabul for treatment, an ISAF spokesman said.

Officials did not say who was suspected of carrying out the attack. The city has seen relatively little of the regular violence in southern and eastern Afghanistan that is blamed on fighters allied to the Taliban and other militant groups.

Taliban loyalists vowed to overthrow the Karzai government after their fundamentalist regime was ousted in a US-led campaign in late 2001.—AFP