Nato said on Monday that its troops had captured a member of the Al Qaeda-linked Haqqani network in connection with a weekend suicide attack on an Afghan flea market that killed four soldiers.
Sunday’s attack took place outside a US-Afghan military base in Gardez, the provincial capital of eastern Paktia province, which borders Pakistan's tribal belt where the
Haqqani leadership and other Taliban are based.
Nato said the arrested man acted as an intermediary for suicide bombers and linked him to the market attack that killed two Nato and two Afghan soldiers.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack. "Afghan and coalition forces captured a Haqqani facilitator who is believed to be linked to Sunday’s suicide attack," the alliance said.
The military said the man and two associates were detained at a compound outside Gardez, where an automatic weapon was impounded. At least 678 foreign soldiers have been killed in the Afghan war so far in 2010, by far the bloodiest toll in the nine-year conflict, according to an AFP tally based on that tracked by the independent icasualties.Org website.
Last year 521 foreign troops were killed. The Taliban and allied Islamist networks bomb on a daily basis Afghan troops and members of the more than 140,000-strong US-led force fighting a counter-insurgency campaign mostly in the south and east of the country.
The Haqqani network is based in North Waziristan, Pakistan's premier Taliban and Al Qaeda fortress just across the border from Afghanistan.
The group is loyal to the Taliban and has been blamed for some of the deadliest anti-US attacks in Afghanistan, including a suicide attack at a US base in Khost in 2009 that killed seven US CIA operatives.