14 U.K. Troops Die In NATO Plane Crash

A NATO aircraft crashed in southern Afghanistan on Saturday, killing 14 British armed forces personnel, the Defense Ministry said. Clashes across the volatile south killed nine Afghan policemen and at least 13 suspected Taliban.

A suicide attacker also detonated a car bomb near a U.S.-led coalition convoy, wounding a coalition soldier.

The International Security Assistance Force said the plane had reported a technical problem before going down and hostile fire did not appear to be the cause. The British Ministry of Defense said the dead included 12 Royal Air Force personnel, a Royal Marine and an army soldier.

The "aircraft was supporting a NATO mission. It went off the radar and crashed in an open area in Kandahar," said Maj. Scott Lundy, spokesman for the International Security Assistance Force.

The crash happened about 12 miles west of the city of Kandahar, he said.

Lundy gave no other details, but ISAF said in a statement that the plane had announced it had a technical problem before going down.

However, shortly after the crash, a purported spokesman for the Taliban, Abdul Khaliq, claimed responsibility.

"We used a stringer missile to shoot down the aircraft," he said.

Haji Eisamuddin, a local tribal elder, told The Associated Press by phone that the wreckage of the plane was burning in an open field, and that coalition forces had started arriving at the scene.

"I can see three-four helicopters in the sky, and coalition forces are also arriving in the area," he said.

The plane crash and the violence came amid the deadliest upsurge in militant attacks and fighting in Afghanistan since the ouster of the Taliban regime by U.S.-led forces nearly five years ago.

In the deadliest incident, insurgents attacked a police checkpoint on Friday, killing five policemen and wounding seven others in the Grieshk district of Helmand province, about 250 miles southwest of Kabul, said Ghulam Muhiddin, the Helmand governor's spokesman. Police returned fire and killed three Taliban and wounded two.

Muhiddin said the Taliban abducted four other police, and hundreds of police were hunting for them Saturday.

Suspected Taliban militants ambushed a convoy carrying Khash Rod district police chief in southwestern Nimroz province late Friday, killing the chief, Juma Khan, and three police riding with him, said Nimroz Gov. Ghulam Dasthaqir.

Police returned fire, killing three militants, he said. The remaining militants fled, leaving behind two assault rifles.

Four Taliban were killed late Friday in an exchange of fire with police in the Garamsair district of the southern Zabul province, district police chief Ghulam Rasool said. He said no police officers were wounded.

Meanwhile, the United Nations reported Saturday that opium cultivation in Afghanistan is spiraling out of control, rising 59 percent this year to produce a record 6,100 tons nearly a third more than the world's drug users consume.

Antonio Maria Costa, the U.N. anti-drug chief, said the results from his agency's annual survey of Afghanistan's poppy crop were "very alarming."

"This year's harvest will be around 6,100 tons of opium a staggering 92 percent of total world supply. It exceeds global consumption by 30 percent," Costa told reporters in Kabul after presenting the survey to President Hamid Karzai. Opium is the raw material of heroin.

On Friday, police raided a Taliban hide-out in a remote area of Zabul province, triggering a shootout in which three insurgents died, said provincial police chief Noor Mohammad Paktin.

He said police seized three assault rifles and two satellite phones from the hide-out.

In Kandahar province, the Afghan army supported by airstrikes launched an operation Saturday against Taliban militants in the districts of Panjwayi and Zadi, said Gov. Asadullah Khalid, who reported that the militants had suffered some casualties. He had no further details.

Khalid said authorities there were forbidding any traffic — including cars, motorbikes and even bicycles — on roads other than the main Highway One during the operation because of the presence of Taliban fighters. He warned that any vehicle seen on the roads "will be targeted."

In the east, an assailant driving an explosives-laden Toyota sedan attacked a convoy of Afghan and U.S.-led coalition forces in the Bati Kot district of Nangarhar province, said provincial police spokesman Ghafor Khan.

He said three people were wounded — one coalition solider, an Afghan soldier and an Afghan translator. The unidentified attacker died.

Coalition spokeswoman Lt. Tamara Lawrence confirmed that a coalition soldier and an Afghan soldier had been wounded in a blast near the Nangarhar capital of Jalalabad. However, she said it was a roadside bomb.