Six Afghan soldiers, aid worker killed by Taliban

Six Afghan soldiers and a driver for a US aid agency were killed on Thursday in a raid by suspected Taliban guerrillas and the fundamentalis...

Six Afghan soldiers and a driver for a US aid agency were killed on Thursday in a raid by suspected Taliban guerrillas and the fundamentalist group said it had killed five government soldiers in separate attack.

The death toll would be the biggest for a single day attributed to a resurgent Taliban guerrilla movement in many months, although local government officials denied the latter incident had been an attack and gave no casualty figure for it. In Kabul, meanwhile, state television said police had discovered five Soviet-designed rockets primed to fire in a district just south of the capital that was once a base of a warlord who used to bombard the city with rockets.

The attack that killed the aid worker from Mercy Corps came just before dawn on a remote district headquarters in Deshu in the troubled southern province of Helmand not far from the Pakistani border, the deputy provincial police chief said.

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‘‘Six Army soldiers and a driver for Mercy Corps lost their lives in the incident, which happened after morning prayers,’’ Mohammad Ayoub said. He said the soldiers were killed in a gunbattle resisting the raid. He did not know if any of the attackers, whom he described as Taliban guerrillas, had been killed.

Rod Volway, head of Mercy Corps office in Kandahar, confirmed that their driver Raz Mohammad had been killed. He said three Afghan employees had been in Deshu conducting an assessment for an agricultural project. Two others were safe and Mercy Corps was withdrawing them and other teams. (Reuters)