Suicide car bomber dies close to NATO Afghan base

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

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

Farah's governor, Izatullah Wasifi, said the suicide attacker was killed in a car he was driving just a few hundred metres from a base used by US 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 from Farah.

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.

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