POLICE stopped a suicide bomber from driving a stolen police jeep packed with explosives into a base in Afghanistan, officials said overnight, but a series other attacks around the country killed 17 people.
A policeman spotted the bomber and shot at him before he could enter the police camp in Delaram, a district in the southwestern province of Farah, deputy provincial governor Mohammad Younus Rasouli said.
"As the police opened fire, the bomber blew up the vehicle which was packed with explosives. Two police officers, including the one who fired, were very slightly injured," Mr Rasouli said.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility but the extremist Taliban militant group has been behind most of a wave of bombings and suicide attacks over the past two years.
The British defence ministry announced yesterday that one of its troops was killed in a bombing that day in the neighbouring province of Helmand.
Another NATO soldier was killed in an separate incident the same day, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said without giving the soldier`s nationality.
In another attack, dozens of militants stormed overnight a government building about 100km south of Kabul, Wardak province deputy police chief Mohammad Asif said.
They were prevented from seizing the building in a two-hour gunbattle in which six rebels were killed, Mr Asif said.
Also in Wardak, a mine apparently intended for police exploded under a civilian car today and killed two people, he said.
Police meanwhile found the decapitated body of a police officer, who had been captured by rebels in Farah while travelling home for a holiday, said regional police spokesman Abdul Mutalib Rad.
He blamed the killed on the Taliban, who were in government between 1996 and 2001, and have carried out several beheadings as part of their insurgency.
In another incident, a mine blew up a truck transporting sheep in southwestern Nimroz province which neighbours Farah, provincial governor Ghulam Dastgir Azad said.
Five men and several animals were killed.
And a tanker driver working with an agency was killed in the eastern province of Khost, a troubled region near the Pakistani border, an army spokesman said.
"Then they came and killed the driver and stole his tanker," said Mohammad Gul, blaming the "opposition".
Violence from a Taliban-led insurgency launched months after they were toppled from government in a US-led invasion in 2001 has spiked in recent weeks and several operations are under way against the Islamic fighters.
Afghan authorities are assisted in their battle to stop the unrest by about 70,000 US and NATO soldiers.
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