Kabul - Five schoolchildren were killed in a suicide attack in eastern Afghanistan Sunday, while three more children were killed in a rocket attack in the capital, Kabul, officials reported.
A suicide bomber targeted a government building in Mandozai district of the south-eastern province of Khost on Sunday morning, killing himself and eight other people, while wounding 50 others, Mohammad Yaqoub Khan, security chief of Khost police forces said.
He said that the bomber detonated his explosive-packed vehicle after he was stopped by Afghan security forces from entering the district chief's office, where dozens of local tribal elders had gathered for a meeting on security.
Asif Nang, spokesman for the Ministry of Education said that five schoolchildren were killed in the attack. Fifteen others were wounded.
Additionally, three security personnel, who were guarding the building at the time of the attack, were killed, Khan said. He added that US forces were also present in a compound close to the attack site, but that those forces reported no injuries.
Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid claimed responsibility for the attack and said that one of their fighters, Qari Hamidullah, carried out the attack in a Toyota Surf vehicle.
Mujahid, who was talking by phone from an undisclosed location, said that 20 Afghan and foreign soldiers were killed in the attack that was carried out by a vehicle laden with 1,500 kilograms of explosives.
Taliban militants who were driven from power in late 2001, have increasingly relied on the use of suicide and roadside attacks in the country.
In another incident, three members of a family were killed and four others were wounded when a rocket fired from an unknown location hit their house in the western part of Kabul on Saturday night, Alishah Paktiawal, head of the criminal investigative department of the Kabul police said.
"Three young sisters were killed and four others, including a man and three women, were wounded in the attack," he said.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai condemned both attacks and said that the perpetrators could not elude punishment by Afghan government.
Kabul has witnessed several suicide attacks this year, but rocket assaults are rare. The attack raised concerns that insurgents were edging closer to the base of the Western-backed government.
Meanwhile, one civilian was killed and nine others were wounded when a mine placed near a music shop went off in Tarin Kot, the capital for the southern province of Uruzgan on Sunday, interior ministry said in a statement.
The statement said that police arrested six people in connection with the blast, but did not identify the group behind the attack.
During the Taliban regime between 1996 to 2001, music was banned because the ultra-Islamic regime regarded it as un-Islamic.
In another, separate incident, US-led coalition troops killed four militants in an operation in the Sarobi district of Kabul province on Saturday, US military said in a statement.
Another militant was killed and six detained by the combined forces in a separate operation in Gyan district of the south-eastern province of Paktika, also on Saturday, the statement added.
NATO-led forces, meanwhile, arrested a Taliban commander, who was involved in attacks against Afghan and international forces, in central Logar province on Saturday, the alliance said in a statement.
The detained commander, whose identity was not disclosed in the statement, was involved in planning an ambush against the provincial governor of Logar, the statement added.
Despite the presence of nearly 70,000 foreign forces and seven years after the fall of the Taliban regime, the militants are still a force with which to be reckoned. Over the past two years, the Taliban-led insurgents have extended their control to larger swathes of the country.
The militants have vowed to continue their insurgency throughout the harsh Afghan winter months.
