By Bronwen Roberts, AFP
A suicide bomber blew himself up at the funeral of an assassinated Afghan politician, killing six people, as NATO said the Taliban death toll in a key offensive had passed 500.

Several cabinet ministers escaped harm Monday but dozens of other people were wounded in the explosion at the ceremony for Hakim Taniwal, the governor of Paktia province who died in a Taliban suicide blast the previous day.

The latest explosion coincided with the fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks on the United States and highlighted the continuing threat from the Taliban movement that was overthrown as a result of the atrocity.

"President Hamid Karzai condemns the terrorist suicide attack, in which six countrymen attending the funeral of the late Taniwal were killed and more than 10 others were wounded," his spokesman Karim Rahimi told AFP.

"The enemies of Afghanistan attacking innocent people during the funeral of the late Taniwal showed that they're not only the enemy of the Afghan people but they're also the enemy of Islam," he said.

Five of the dead were policemen and the sixth was a civilian, said Mohammad Wali Noori, a doctor at a nearby hospital. He said 63 people were wounded, including some local administrators and police.

High-ranking officials including the ministers for refugees, the interior and parliamentary affairs who flew in by helicopter for the ceremony were unhurt, government sources said.

The bomber struck after funeral prayers for Taniwal, just before his body was taken from a house that he owned in his home village of Hisarak to be buried at a nearby cemetery.

"It was a suicide attack carried out by a young boy around 16 to 17. We found his severed head after the blast," Khost police chief Mohammad Ayoob said.

Human flesh and broken pieces of shattered car windows were strewn all over the site, an AFP correspondent at the scene witnessed.

Taniwal, in his 60s, became one of the highest profile targets of the insurgency on Sunday along with his nephew and bodyguard when a Taliban suicide bomber blew himself up while pretending to greet Taniwal in Gardez, the capital of Paktia province.

Described by Karzai as a close personal friend, the former sociology professor spent about 20 years in exile in Australia and returned after the Taliban were ousted by US-led and Afghan resistance forces in late 2001.

NATO said Monday its forces and Afghan troops had killed 92 more Taliban in air and artillery strikes in southern Afghanistan, pushing the number of militants killed in a 10-day offensive to more than 510.

The deaths were the latest in Operation Medusa, which was launched on September 2 to clear the Taliban from the restive districts of Panjwayi and Zhari, near Kandahar city, the birthplace of the Taliban.

Medusa is the biggest operation in the south since ISAF took over there on July 31 from the US-led coalition. Twenty foreign troops have also been killed during the operation, including 14 Britons whose reconnaissance plane crashed.

Separately Afghan and NATO forces Monday retook the volatile Garmser district in the southern province of Helmand, which was overrun by Taliban insurgents last week, killing at least four rebels, officials said.

In other violence, a suicide attacker blew himself up Monday as police chased him in eastern Paktika province, a security official said on condition of anonymity. No one else was hurt.

Also a loud blast was heard in Kabul late Monday but ISAF said it was a controlled explosion.

The US military warned Sunday of a "suicide cell" operating in the capital, where two US soldiers and 14 Afghans died in a suicide attack last week.

Suicide bombings were previously rare in Afghanistan but officials say they have become more common in recent months as the Taliban and their Al-Qaeda allies intensify their insurgency.

NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer chaired an extraordinary meeting of alliance ambassadors in Brussels on Monday aimed at finding more troops for Afghanistan, which he called the "cradle of 9/11".

The meeting followed a call last week by NATO's military chief, US General James Jones, for reinforcements of up to 2,500 troops.

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