Suicide blast kills eight: police

A suicide car bomber targeting international troops in southern Afghanistan killed at least eight civilians and injured another 22 on Thursday, police said.

The blast happened in Kandahar, where the ousted Taliban militants rose to prominence in the 1990s, on the road to the city's airport which is home to thousands of foreign troops.

"Eight people have been killed and 22 others including two policemen were injured. It was a suicide bombing," provincial police chief Sayed Agha Saqeb told AFP at the site of the blast.

He said the explosion occurred as a NATO-led military convoy passed through the area. There was no immediate comment from NATO's International Security Assistance Force.

Most of the casualties were carpenters who own workshops at the side of the road.

"May God kill you. You are killing our sons," cried a veiled woman, who said her son was running one of the carpentry shops and was missing following the blast.

Limbs and human flesh were scattered around the scene, while the burned-out remains of a mangled car lay in the middle of the road, an AFP reporter at the scene said.

Police sealed off the area, the reporter said.

The bombing was the latest in a string of such attacks blamed on Taliban militants which have rocked Kandahar and other Afghan cities in recent months.

Nearly 140 people, most of them civilians, were killed in two separate suicide bombings in two days in Kandahar in February.

One of the bombings targeted a crowd watching a dog-fighting match, killing about 100 people in the deadliest attack since the Taliban launched an insurgency after a US-led invasion toppled their regime in 2001.

The Taliban were ousted from power for failing to hand over Al-Qaeda chief Osama Bin Laden, and are now trying to topple the US-backed government in Kabul and drive out foreign troops from Afghanistan.

More than 8,000 people were killed in violence last year, the deadliest since 2001, according to the United Nations. About 1,500 of those were civilians while most were Taliban rebels.