'Bag of sweets' kills girl

An Afghan girl just eight years old was killed when a bag of explosives given to her by Taliban insurgents exploded as she approached a police outpost in southern Afghanistan, the government said yesterday.

"The insurgents handed over a bag with a home-made bomb to an eight-year-old girl and asked her to take it to police forces," the Ministry of Interior said in a statement.

"As the girl was getting close to the police, it exploded and killed her."

There were no police casualties.

There have been occasional cases of insurgents using female bombers or, more commonly, fighters dressing as women in head-to-toe burqa coverings, but the use of children had been almost unheard of until recently.

In May, Afghan police paraded four boys, all younger than 13, who they said had been recruited as bombers from their homes in neighbouring Pakistan. One of the boys said they had been told they would live through the suicide attacks.

The Taliban later denied it was recruiting children to carry out suicide attacks.

The girl's death comes as four Nato troops were killed over the past two days, including two Spanish soldiers who died yesterday after a home-made bomb exploded in western Afghanistan.

A suicide car bomber killed at least 20 people and possibly as many as 35 in an attack at a hospital in Logar province on Saturday. The walls of the maternity ward were damaged.

Military and civilian casualties hit record levels in 2010, the most violent year of the war since US-backed Afghan forces toppled the Taliban in late 2001.

This year is following a similar trend, with violence growing across Afghanistan since the Taliban announced a new offensive at the beginning of May.