Blast in Afghanistan kills child and wounds four

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (Reuters) - A bicycle bomb killed a child and wounded four people in the main southern Afghan city of Kandahar on Saturday, police said.

The bomb was detonated by remote control as a police convoy passed through the centre of Kandahar, police official Mohammad Yaqub told Reuters. Three of those wounded were police, he said.

A NATO spokesman confirmed the attack, saying the child who was killed was nine years old.

Thousands of people have died in violence in Afghanistan in recent years as the Taliban has stepped up attacks despite the presence of more than 55,000 foreign troops led by NATO and the U.S. military and nearly 150,000 Afghan security forces.

Taliban Islamist militants aim to topple the pro-Western Afghan government and drive foreign troops out of the country.

U.S.-led forces overthrew the Taliban's strict Islamist government after its leadership refused to hand over al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden, the architect of the September 11 attacks on the United States.

In another incident, six civilians were wounded when Taliban insurgents fired rockets aimed at a government building in Ziruk district of Paktika province on Friday, a spokesman for the provincial governor, Ghamai Mohammadyar, said.

The rockets missed their target and hit civilian houses instead. Foreign troops responded with air-strikes killing four Taliban insurgents, he said.

Elsewhere, Afghan and U.S.-led coalition forces killed several Taliban militants in the eastern province of Khost, the U.S. military said in a statement on Saturday.

The incident happened in the district of Sabari on Friday while Afghan and coalition forces were carrying out search operations targeting a Taliban extremist, the U.S. military said.

(Reporting by Ismail Sameem in Kandahar and Elyas Wahdat in Khost; Writing by Jonathon Burch; Editing by David Fox)

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