KANDAHAR/ KABUL, Aug 25: A roadside bomb tore through a police vehicle in southern Afghanistan on Saturday, killing at least eight police officers and wounding two others, police said.

Another police officer was missing following the powerful blast in the Shahwali Kot district of the insurgency-hit southern province of Kandahar, police official Abdul Qayoum said.

“A roadside bomb exploded under one of our vehicles and eight policemen in it were killed, two were injured and another one is missing,” Qayoum said.

He said the bomb was a remote-controlled device, of the type Taliban insurgents usually use in their attacks against Afghan and foreign military targets.

In Kabul, a suicide car bomber struck a convoy of Western troops in the Afghan capital on Saturday and wounded two soldiers.

The attack happened on a road leading east from Kabul which is regularly used by Nato and US-led troops.

Two foreign soldiers were taken to hospital after the blast, a spokesman for the Nato-led force said.

Violence has surged in Afghanistan in the past 19 months, the bloodiest period since US-led troops toppled the Taliban government in 2001.

On Friday night, a rocket landed inside a hospital compound in Kabul but caused no casualties or damage, hospital officials said on Saturday.

“It was 11 pm when a rocket hit inside the Wazir Akbar Khan compound,” said a doctor who worked at the Wazir Akbar Khan hospital. “No one was wounded or killed, and the hospital received no damage. It hit a garden inside the hospital.”

No group claimed responsibility for the attack.

Afghan troops killed 19 Taliban insurgents in clashes in Ghazni province, southwest of Kabul, on Friday, the provincial governor told Reuters on Saturday.

Six more Taliban rebels were killed when they ambushed a police patrol in the south-eastern province of Paktika on Friday, the Interior Ministry said on Saturday.—Agencies