SPIN BOLDAK, Feb 18: A Taliban suicide car bomb aimed at Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan killed 37 civilians on Monday, a day after another suicide blast left 100 dead in the country’s deadliest such attack.

Nato’s International Security Assistance Force said three of its soldiers were also wounded in the powerful suicide blast on Monday in a car parts market about 50 metres from the Pakistan border in the town of Spin Boldak.

It would not comment on the nationality of the troops but Kandahar province governor Asadullah Khalid told reporters they were Canadians.

The Canadian military confirmed it had a convoy in the area but would not say if it had been involved in any incident.

The interior ministry said the attack killed 37 civilians and wounded 30 more.

The blast caused a fire and destroyed a vegetable market, leaving a 30-metre-wide hole in the ground, a reporter at the scene said. More than 100 shops were destroyed or damaged, he added.

About 20 burned bodies were collected in one clinic, many lying on the floor, he said. Witnesses said many of the victims were shopkeepers.

“My cousins were killed. I can’t find their bodies,” said one trader, 25-year-old Abdul Majeed.

A spokesman for the extremist Taliban movement said his group had carried out the blast, which is similar to scores carried out by extremists who were in government between 1996 and 2001.

President Hamid Karzai issued a statement condemning the attack as cowardly and brutal. “The enemies of Afghanistan once again mercilessly killed innocent people in Kandahar who were living their normal lives,” he said.

The attack came a day after a suicide bomber blew himself up in a crowd of hundreds of men and boys watching dog fighting outside Kandahar city. More than 100 people were killed, according to a toll issued by province governor Khalid on Monday.

It was the deadliest suicide blast since the fall of the Taliban regime in a US-led invasion. The Taliban were behind most of around 140 suicide attacks last year.

Khalid said the target of Sunday’s blast was an anti-Taliban militia commander, Abdul Hakim Jan, who was killed along with about 35 of his men, according to an aide.

The commander had been warned that his life was under threat from the Taliban, the governor told hundreds of people packed into a mosque for a ceremony to mourn Jan.

“We told him a week ago that a suicide bomber was looking for him,” he said.

Afghan officials blamed the extremist Taliban for the attack. But a spokesman for the movement, Yousuf Ahmadi, rejected Taliban involvement, suggesting the motive was infighting among pro-government commanders.

Sunday’s bombing was condemned by the United Nations and several Western countries which have a military presence in the war-ravaged country.

The UN Security Council underlined in a statement “the need to bring perpetrators, organisers, financiers and sponsors of this reprehensible act of terrorism to justice.” The British Ministry of Defence announced meanwhile on Monday that one of its soldiers was killed on Sunday in a separate explosion in the southern province of Helmand, which sees some of the worst violence of the Taliban-led insurgency.

The soldier was killed and another wounded when they were caught in a blast while on foot patrol in the Kajaki area, the Ministry of Defence said.

The new casualty took to 16 the number of international soldiers killed in Afghanistan this year. Most of them have been US nationals but the toll also includes Canadian, British, Dutch and Italian troops.

ISAF and the United States, which heads a separate force in Afghanistan that focuses on counterterrorism, have been calling for more troops for the country ahead of an expected surge in the unrest in spring.—AFP