[1]A Taliban suicide bomber who killed five foreign and four Afghan soldiers in a weekend attack in the East of the country was a member of the Afghan Army, Nato's coalition force said on Monday.
The bomber detonated his explosives in an attack Saturday on the Army's Eastern headquarters in the Gambiri desert area in Laghman province, near Jalalabad city, the de facto capital of Afghanistan's East.
"What we know so far is that the attacker, the suicide bomber, was an Afghan National Army service member," a spokesman for the Nato-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), Brigadier Josef Blotz, told reporters.
It was the deadliest single incident in 2011 against international forces in Afghanistan and comes amid a wave of attacks by rogue security forces on their comrades, three months before foreign troops start a limited pullback.
The blast came a day after the provincial police chief of Kandahar in Southern Afghanistan, Khan Mohammad Mujahid, was killed in a suicide bombing carried out by an attacker in police uniform.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for both attacks, as well as for one on Monday inside the defence ministry in Kabul which killed two Afghan soldiers.
Blotz said both Afghan national security forces and Nato were investigating the attack and the Afghan security forces had pledged "even more rigorous efforts in order to prevent such tragic incidents" happening in the future.
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[1] http://archive.asianage.com/afgajpg-518