KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — The police chief in the key southern Afghan province of Kandahar was killed by a Taliban suicide bomber Friday along with two of his bodyguards, officials said.
The killings at the police headquarters in Kandahar city are a serious blow to security in the province, seen as the birthplace of the Taliban and a pivotal battleground in the near ten-year war against the Islamist militants.
They are the latest in a wave of insurgent attacks against the 120,000-strong Afghan police, who are due to take on more responsibility for security ahead of the planned withdrawal of foreign combat troops in 2014.
"A suicide attacker detonated himself at the police headquarters. The police chief has been martyred," provincial spokesman Zalmai Ayubi said.
A spokesman for the interior ministry in Kabul, Zemarai Bashary, confirmed that the police chief, Khan Mohammad Mujahid, had died and said his two bodyguards were also killed.
"Two of his bodyguards were martyred in the suicide attack and three police personnel were also injured," he said.
Mujahid, a former mujahedeen fighter against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s, only took up the job in October and had apparently survived two previous attempts on his life.
At least one of his predecessors was also assassinated by the Taliban, in 2009.
The killing is the second claimed by the Taliban of a provincial police chief in just over a month -- in March, the top officer in the northern province of Kunduz was assassinated.
Taliban spokesman Yusuf Ahmadi said one of its members was behind the latest attack.
"He had disguised himself as a policeman and shot the police chief with his pistol, hugged him and then detonated himself," he said.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai condemned the killings and insisted that insurgents "would not achieve their evil goals by such terrorist attacks", while the US commander of foreign troops in Afghanistan, General David Petraeus, also spoke against them.
In chaotic scenes in Kandahar, ambulances and military vehicles rushed to the blast area while local shopkeepers hastily closed up businesses and streets were largely empty of residents.
Pools of blood and human body parts were scattered at the scene of the attack inside the police compound, an AFP reporter said.
The blast took place in the same building where, in February, 19 people including 15 police and an intelligence agent were killed in a series of assaults by the Taliban.
Last week, six Afghan security personnel were killed as Taliban gunmen detonated a bomb hidden in an ambulance during an attack on a police centre near Kandahar city, where a new police headquarters is being built.
A spokesman for NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said that no international troops were caught up in Friday's attack.
Foreign forces claim that Kandahar and the surrounding area are now safer overall following months of intense fighting to clear traditional Taliban strongholds.
There are around 130,000 international troops in Afghanistan, two-thirds of them from the United States, battling the Taliban and other insurgents.
Limited withdrawals from seven relatively peaceful areas, only one of which is in southern Afghanistan, are due to start in July ahead of the planned end of foreign combat operations in 2014.
But US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned at a NATO foreign ministers meeting in Berlin on Thursday that nations involved in Afghanistan should not rush to exit due to "political expediency and short-term thinking".
"We have to steel ourselves and our publics for the possibility that the Taliban will resort to the most destructive and sensational attacks we have seen," she said.
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