Suicide bomber dies close to NATO Afghan base

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan, Jun 1 (Reuters) A suicide car bomber was today killed close to a base for US troops serving with a NATO-led peacekeeping mission in western Afghanistan when his bomb went off too soon, a provincial governor said.

The governor of Farah province, Izatullah Wasifi, said the suicide attacker was killed in a car he was driving just a few hundred metres from a base used by U.S. troops serving with the NATO mission.

''We do not know the target of the attack, but we can say it was a suicide raid and there were no other casualties apart from the suicide car bomber,'' he told Reuters by phone.

The incident in Farah, the main town in the province of the same name, comes during the bloodiest phase in a Taliban insurgency since US-backed forces overthrew the militants' Islamist hardline government in late 2001.

In a separate incident, a roadside bomb hit a police vehicle, killing one and wounding three in the eastern province of Nangarhar, a provincial police official said.

Some 900 people have been killed in the insurgency since the beginning of the year, half of them in May. Air strikes by US-led coalition forces inflicted particularly heavy casualties on the insurgents in the south of Afghanistan last month.

An upsurge in Taliban activity in the south coincides with preparations for NATO-led peacekeepers to take control of southern provinces from coalition forces, which have had a more offensive mission to hunt down Taliban and al Qaeda remnants.

REUTERS SI KP2008