Afghan children and US soldiers were among six people reported killed in Afghanistan today, a week after millions voted in a landmark election they hope will bring peace back to their war-ravaged nation.
The fresh violence came as vote counting in the historic presidential election resumed after a break on Friday to mark the start of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
A high turnout in last week's poll, which President Hamid Karzai is expected to win, was celebrated as a turning point in Afghanistan's political transition to some sort of democracy.
The absence of significant attacks by Taliban fighters and their Islamist militant allies in the weeks before the vote was seen as a major success for US, Afghan and NATO-led forces.
But reports of violence resumed a week after the vote with the death of at least three children and a policeman in a bomb explosion yesterday in southeastern Afghanistan.
The children had gathered round a truck set ablaze by suspected militants in the province of Kunar when the militants detonated the bomb by remote control soon after a local police chief arrived to investigate.
"One of the police chief's bodyguards was killed on the spot along with three children who had gathered in the area to see the fire," said one resident in the Asmar area of Kunar.
Elsewhere, a US military spokesman said today, two US troops were killed and three wounded by a similar bomb while out on patrol in the southcentral Uruzgan province on Thursday.
They were the first US soldiers to die in Afghanistan since last week's historic presidential election. The attack in Uruzgan, the home province of fugitive Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar, brought the number of US personnel killed in Afghanistan to 102 since the invasion of the country late in 2001.