Three Danish soldiers killed in Afghanistan

Wed Jun 17, 2009, 1:46 pm ET

KABUL (AFP) –

Three Danish soldiers were killed Wednesday when a bomb tore through their vehicle in Afghanistan, the Danish military said, as Afghan authorities said seven people had died in other violence.

The attack in the southern province of Helmand, one of the deadliest single strikes for the Danish contribution to the NATO-led force, comes amid a steep rise in insurgent attacks two months ahead of presidential elections.

Danish Defence Minister Soeren Gade said the trio were on patrol when they were hit by a "very powerful bomb placed on the roadside."

Taliban fighters regularly use such bombs against Afghan government and international troops.

Twenty-four Danes have now been killed in Afghanistan since Denmark deployed troops at the end of 2001, giving the Scandinavian country the highest per capita death rate among NATO forces in the war-torn country.

Denmark has more than 700 troops in Afghanistan, most of them stationed in Helmand province, where the Taliban control a handful of districts.

NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) confirmed the bomb blast but gave no details.

The new deaths take to 140 the number of international troops killed in Afghanistan this year, according to a toll maintained by icasualties.org.

ISAF says about 70 percent of its casualties are from bomb blasts.

In other violence, four private Afghan security guards were killed on Tuesday when they were attacked while escorting trucks that supply foreign forces bases in southern Afghanistan, police said.

"The guards returned fire. The fighting between them lasted for one-and-a-half hours. Four guards were martyred," deputy provincial police chief Abdul Rahman Shaheedani told AFP.

The attackers were likely to have been Taliban fighters and were also believed to have suffered casualties, the police chief said.

Also Tuesday, three Taliban fighters were killed in a gunfight with Afghan army soldiers in the neighbouring province of Paktika, the defence ministry said in a statement.

Western military officials and Afghan leaders admit that the violence has increased in recent months as the war-scarred nation prepares for its second-ever presidential elections, in August.

Campaigning for the poll officially started on Tuesday.

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