Afghanistan's Taliban on Monday dismissed as "pure propaganda" claims that their leader Mullah Omar was dead after an Afghan intelligence source said he had been killed in Pakistan.

Taliban militants armed with guns and rocket-propelled grenades on Saturday attacked the office of the governor of Afghanistan's Kandahar province, with casualties reported.

Authorities said on Tuesday they have recaptured 65 prisoners who were among about 500 inmates who escaped in an audacious Taliban-led jailbreak in Southern Afghanistan.

The police chief of Southern Afghanistan’s Kandahar province has been killed in a suicide attack at the city's police headquarters, officials said on Friday.

The Police headquarters in the volatile Southern Afghan city of Kandahar came under attack on Saturday, an official said, adding there had been an explosion and gunfire nearby.

The Taliban said Saturday that France had "not paid much attention" to their demands for securing the release of two French journalists held captive for more than a year.

Fourteen civilians were killed and four others injured in a blast linked to insurgents in southern Afghanistan on Thursday, an official said.

A roadside bomb blast in southern Afghanistan killed 15 civilians, including children, a provincial spokesman said on Saturday, blaming the attack on Taliban militants.

Afghan officials say two air strikes over the weekend in southern Afghanistan killed 16 insurgents.

A suicide attacker detonated a car bomb in the southern Afghan province of Kandahar on Monday, killing five children and injuring one other, a police official told AFP.