Bombs kill four Afghans, one Australian soldier

A suicide car bomb claimed by Taliban insurgents blew up near the US embassy in Kabul Thursday and killed four Afghan civilians while another bomb in the south killed an Australian soldier, officials said.

The suicide blast, about 100 metres (330 feet) from the heavily secured entrance to the embassy, damaged several vehicles in morning rush-hour traffic. Blood smeared the road and tree branches were set alight.

"The information we have so far is that four people have been killed and three wounded. It was a suicide attack," said a city police chief, General Alishah Paktiawal.

Eighteen people were treated in hospital, health ministry spokesman Abdullah Fahim told AFP.

Remains of the suicide attacker lay on the ground near the burning remnants of the car used to carry the bomb.

The heavily barricaded US embassy, which sits on a road entirely closed to traffic, was shut Thursday for the Thanksgiving holiday.

"All embassy staff are accounted for," US embassy spokesman Mark Stroh told AFP.

The Taliban, an extremist Islamic group that ran the government in Kabul from 1996 to 2001, said through a spokesman it had carried out the attack and claimed it was aimed at international soldiers passing by.

However the US military and the separate NATO-led force said they were not aware of their troops having been in the area.

A shopkeeper also said he had seen no foreigners at the time of the blast, adding the attacker appeared to have accidentally struck a civilian car, causing the explosion.

"He was driving very fast somewhere when he had the accident," 20-year-old Arif Hussain told AFP.

The Afghan capital has suffered a rash of attacks this year, fuelling fears that a Taliban-led insurgency which has mostly affected the south and east of the country is encroaching on the capital.

The biggest suicide attack in the capital was in July outside the Indian embassy. It killed about 60 people.

Also Thursday, a bomb struck a foot patrol of soldiers in NATO's International Security Assistance Force in the southern province of Uruzgan, killing an Australian soldier, ISAF and the Australian Defence Force said.

Australians make up around 300 of the nearly 70,000 foreign soldiers in Afghanistan, most of whom are from the United States.

ISAF announced meanwhile it had killed three people spotted planting a bomb in east Afghanistan Tuesday while an Afghan official said 14 local roadworkers kidnapped by suspected Taliban a month ago had been freed.

Deteriorating security is a concern for Afghanistan's international allies who have stumped up troops and military equipment along with billions of dollars to rid the country of its extremist threat and rebuild after decades of war.

NATO's secretary general and a UN Security Council team this week heard concerns, including from President Hamid Karzai, about progress in the US-led "war on terror" launched in Afghanistan following the 2001 ousting of the Taliban regime.

"We did not welcome the international community in Afghanistan so that our lives get worse," Karzai told reporters Tuesday after talks with NATO chief Jaap de Hoop Scheffer.

Condemning Thursday's bombing, the president said that Afghan people "are thirsty for peace and stability and strongly oppose barbaric terrorist attacks and their perpetrators."

Reacting to Wednesday's attacks by Islamic militants that killed more than 100 people in Mumbai, Karzai called for a "vigorous" regional response to the terrorist threat in South Asia.