Bike Bomb Kills 10 In Afghanistan

A bicycle bomb killed at least 10 people in this southern city Tuesday, underlining the violence and insecurity still plaguing Afghanistan two years after the fall of the Taliban.

The blast left a residential street in eastern Kandahar strewn with wrecked bicycles, victims' blood and shattered glass from a passing truck, whose driver was among the dead.

All the victims appeared to be Afghans who were walking past when the blast occurred, Deputy Police Chief Salim Khan told The Associated Press. He said at least 15 other people were injured.

A soldier, Amanullah Popolzai, said authorities arrested a man spotted running away from the scene shortly before the explosion. The man, who appeared to be an Afghan, was caught trying to hide in a nearby home.

"This was the work of the Taliban. The man looked like he was a Talib fighter," Popolzai said.

The U.S. military has its southern headquarters in the city, a former Taliban stronghold, and dozens of Afghan and American soldiers immediately swarmed into the area, sealing it off.

Khan said the man had been taken to an Afghan military headquarters just 100 yards from the scene for interrogation, but had no further information.

Southern and eastern Afghanistan have been plagued with a stream of shootings, kidnappings and bomb blasts against civilians as well as soldiers, many of the them claimed by Taliban.

The violence threatens the timetable for national elections supposed to take place in the summer, and has all but halted badly needed rebuilding across a huge swath of the country along the Pakistani border.

Kandahar, the focus of an ambitious U.S. plan to deploy hundreds of troops and civilian reconstruction workers in the run-up to the vote, has seen several attacks.

On Monday night, gunmen attacked the office of the United Nations refugee agency in Kandahar, throwing a grenade and firing shots but causing no injuries.

A bomb ripped through a bustling bazaar in the city a month ago, wounding 20 Afghans.

Three days earlier, on Dec. 3, two U.S. soldiers were wounded when a suspected member of the Taliban threw a grenade at their parked vehicle in a Kandahar square.

The latest bombing comes two days after a constitutional loya jirga, or grand council, meeting in Kabul ratified a charter supposed to underpin a new state strong enough to put an end to a quarter-century of fighting.

But the three-week convention was marred by an ugly ethnic split, complicating U.N. efforts to disarm regional warlords, who frequently fight each other, in order to ensure the voting is fair.

In the latest factional fighting police said a senior commander in Zabul province, just to the northeast of Kandahar, was shot and killed Monday by security forces loyal to the governor.

The United States is training a new Afghan National Army to curb the warlords. But only about 7,000 soldiers - out of an eventual force of 70,000 - have been deployed.

The 11,000-strong American military force still depends heavily on local militias as it pursues Taliban and al Qaeda guerrillas in the south and east.

By Noor Khan