US embassy vehicles torched in Afghan capital

Rioting erupted in Kabul today when scores of Afghan men set fire to two US embassy vehicles after one collided with a civilian car killing a number of occupants, officials and witnesses said.

Television pictures showed the vehicles in flames and young Afghan men throwing stones at them.

NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said it had despatched a quick reaction force to the area, outside the American embassy and near the US and Afghan army bases in the centre of the city.

An ISAF official said that the vehicles involved belonged to the US embassy.

"We don't know yet how many people were killed in the accident," interior ministry spokesman Zemarai Bashery said.

Witnesses said that four passengers of the civilian car died when it was hit by one of two armoured vehicles moving in convoy.

Police fired shots in the air to quell the violence, a reporter witnessed.

Afghan security forces cordoned off the area, closing the road to Kabul's international airport, he said.

Local resident Saleh Ahmed said the accident happened when the civilian vehicle attempted to drive onto the main road from a side street and was hit by one of the two armoured vehicles.

"The civilian vehicle was trying to get into the main road when the two foreign vehicles hit it and killed all four occupants," he said. "People gathered around the crash site to see what had happened, got angry and started attacking the foreigners."

The AFP reporter on the scene said that the police helped the foreigners leave as the riot continued for about an hour before people started to disperse.

Young Afghan men threw stones and shouted "death to foreigners" and "death to Karzai," referring to president Hamid Karzai, he said.

A similar traffic incident led to massive riots that shook the capital in May 2006, leaving at least 14 people dead.

Deployments by the United States and NATO are nearing their peak of 150,000, concentrated in the southern provinces of Helmand and Kandahar, where a nearly nine-year Taliban insurgency is at its most intense.

A motorcycle bomb targeting a candidate in upcoming parliamentary elections killed a woman and a child in the southern city of Kandahar today, the police said.

The explosives-laden motorcycle was parked in a city centre alley used by the candidate, and detonated minutes after he passed by, provincial deputy police chief Fazel Ahmad Shairzad said.