Suicide bomber kills 5 GIs in Afghanistan

The blast came from a taxi as a US military convoy was heading down a main road to the west of Kandahar city, said a senior police officer, who did no want to be identified.

"The latest report I have is that five people in the vehicle that was hit by the suicide car have been killed," he said. "This was a suicide attack. The person in the car that carried out the act has been torn into pieces."

An Associated Press reporter at the scene said he saw three American soldiers being carried on stretchers into a US military helicopter. Two other US helicopters were hovering overhead and several US military vehicles also had arrived at the site.

The US military could not be immediately reached for comment on the police report of fatalities. Earlier, a US military spokesman in Kabul, Lt. Col. Jerry O'Hara, said he had not heard of the attack.

Taliban-led rebels have stepped up attacks in recent weeks, which the government claims marks an effort to sabotage legislative elections due in September.

On June 1, a suspected al-Qaeda suicide bomber killed 20 people at the funeral of an anti-Taliban cleric in Kandahar, one of the worst terror attacks here since the ouster of the Taliban in 2001.

Five American troops have also died in attacks earlier this month.

Meanwhile, a blast caused by an old explosive device ripped through a scrap metal store in eastern Afghanistan yesterday, killing a shopkeeper and injuring seven people, police said in Jalalabad.

"It was an accident, not a planned or terror explosion," General Akram Khan, police chief of the eastern province of Nangarhar, said of the blast in the city of Jalalabad.

Two of the seven wounded were in serious condition and the others were slightly hurt, an AFP correspondent saw in the city's public hospital.

Sayda Gull, 60, who was among the wounded, said the shopkeeper was splitting the scrap metal when he heard a big blast and then found himself in the hospital.

Decades of war and conflict have left Afghanistan littered with old mines and unexploded ordnance, which is often sold as scrap and is a cause of deadly accidents.