Blasts kill 5 Afghan soldiers, 4 Taliban

Five Afghan soldiers were killed and three injured Saturday in an attack by Islamic fundamentalist Taliban militants in the frontier district of Sharawak near the border with Pakistan, the military commander of the province, General Khan Mohammad, said.

An unknown number of attackers had crossed the border to carry out their operation and escaped back into Pakistan later, the general said.

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In the neighbouring southern province of Helmand four suspected Taliban were killed when the bomb they were building exploded as they worked on it.

"Yesterday four Taliban who were preparing a bomb, a remote-controlled bomb in a pressure cooker, were killed when the bomb went off," Helmand police chief Abdul Rahman Sabir said Saturday.

"The investigation is going on. We have the bodies but we don't know yet whether they are all Afghans; we will be able to tell you their identity after we finish the investigation."

The explosion destroyed the room in which the men were working in the Sangin district of the province, some 490 kilometres (304 miles) from the capital Kabul.

Southern and southeastern Afghanistan have of late experienced an increased number of militant attacks and kidnappings, the most violent being a bomb explosion in the southern city of Kandahar last Tuesday which killed 15 people and injured scores with most of the victims children.

Meanwhile, Afghanistan plans to hold its first democratic elections this summer despite spiralling security issues, factional infighting, low voter-registration and warnings that premature polls could further destabilize the country.

President Hamid Karzai said Saturday he aimed to hold the elections as planned, despite earlier saying they may be put off for several months due to logistical reasons.

"We are trying to reach the date we have set for ourselves which is the month of June or July so we should try to do that," he said.

The comments echoed US ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, who said last week: "I am not of the view at this point that elections cannot take place this June, or this summer."