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Four foreign soldiers killed in north Afghanistan

Mon Jul 6, 2009 8:47am EDT
(For full coverage on Afghanistan, double click on [ID:nAFPAK]) (Adds Afghan, German defence officials, changes dateline)

KUNDUZ, Afghanistan, July 6 (Reuters) - Four foreign soldiers with NATO-led forces were among six people killed by a roadside bomb in Kunduz in northern Afghanistan on Monday, a spokesman for the alliance and an Afghan police official said.

It was the worst security incident involving foreign troops in the north for several weeks. Northern Afghanistan is considered relatively safe compared with Taliban strongholds in the south and east.

A spokesman for the NATO-led alliance did not give any more details about the blast or the nationality of the victims.

Kunduz police chief Abdul Razaaq said two Afghan civilians were also killed.

"There was a joint police and NATO patrol which was hit by a roadside bomb to the east to the city," Razaaq told Reuters.

Germany has about 3,700 troops in Afghanistan, most of them based in Kunduz and other northern provinces. However a German Defence Ministry spokesman in Berlin said the dead soldiers were believed to be Americans, not Germans.

There was no confirmation about the nationality of the dead soldiers from the U.S. military in Afghanistan.

"My understanding is that it was a mentoring team that was en route in a Humvee," the German Defence Ministry spokesman said.

In June, three German soldiers were killed when the armoured personnel carrier they were travelling in came under fire and crashed near Kunduz city.

(Additional reporting by Sayed Salahuddin in KABUL and Noah Barkin in BERLIN; Editing by Paul Tait)






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