KABUL, Feb 8: Two American soldiers were killed in Afghanistan on Sunday when a roadside bomb they were trying to defuse exploded, a US spokeswoman said. An Afghan interpreter and a policeman also died in the blast.

A group of American soldiers and Afghan officials had been travelling through the world’s largest opium-producing region – the southern province of Helmand – when they found the bomb and tried to defuse it, said Kamaluddin, Helmand’s deputy police chief.

In other incidents of violence, Afghanistan’s intelligence service said Afghan villagers on Sunday executed an attacker who killed a member of Nangarhar’s provincial council on Saturday. A spokesman for the National Directorate of Security said the villagers tied the attacker to a tree and shot him.—Agencies