LONDON, Nov 24: A surrendering Taliban soldier on Saturday blew himself up with a handgrenade in a suicide attack which seriously injured a Northern Alliance commander and killed two other fighters near Mazar-i-Sharif, British news network ITV said.

The incident, which happened as alliance forces searched about 500 foreign Taliban fighters outside Mazar-i-Sharif, was reported by Andrea Catherwood, a British ITV journalist who herself received a shrapnel wound to the knee.

Catherwood said the Taliban, mostly from Pakistan, had driven overnight across the desert from Kunduz to surrender.

“They were met by Uzbek warlord General Dostum in the desert, they were disarmed, or so we thought. A lot of heavy arms were taken away in a truck.”

The 500 were taken to General Dostum’s headquarters, a fort, and were searched, Catherwood said.

“One of these foreign fighters pulled the pin in a grenade, he blew himself up, he killed the two former fighters beside him, and he also seriously injured one of the Northern Alliance commanders,” who was not named.

Catherwood added: “The Northern Alliance are not proper soldiers, they were not properly equipped to deal with this situation. They had the Taliban milling around this compound, and they really did not know quite what to do.

“There were a number of injuries apart from the three dead and the one very seriously injured.

“They tried to get the Taliban to put their hands up, there was one shot fired, the situation was very volatile, and we left the situation behind, and got out of the compound.”

A spokeswoman for the British ITN network, for which ITV supplies news, said Catherwood had received medical treatment for her knee injury, but was otherwise safe.

Journalists are keenly aware of the dangers of working in Afghanistan. Seven have been killed since the US-led allied bombing campaign began on Oct 7.

On Nov 11, two French radio reporters, Johanne Sutton and Pierre Billaud, and a German photographer, Volker Handloik, were killed in an attack by Taliban forces on a Northern Alliance convoy some 30 kilometres from the city of Taloqan.

Eight days later, Italian Maria Grazia Cutuli, a correspondent for Corriere della Sera, Spaniard Julio Fuentes, of El Mundo, and Reuters staff Harry Burton, an Australian cameraman, and Azizullah Haidari, a photographer of Afghan origin, were forced out of their cars at gunpoint on the main road east of Kabul.

They were then pushed down a river bank and shot in the back.—AFP