Taliban infiltrators kill four police

Two Afghan local policemen believed to be Taliban infiltrators opened fire on their colleagues in southern Kandahar province on Wednesday, killing four of them, a police official said.

The attack was the latest in a series of shootings in which members of the Afghan security forces have targeted their local and foreign colleagues as NATO-led occupation forces prepare to pull out in 2014.

The policemen were asleep in a village in Zhari district of Kandahar province when they were shot dead by men who had joined the force just three days earlier, regional police spokesman Hekmatullah Kochi said.

"Unfortunately four of our brave local police were killed and two others injured in this cowardly attack," Kochi said, adding that the shooters had escaped.

The Afghan local police are militias that form part of the government's security forces, but do not fall under the national police force.

So far this year 18 attacks by rogue Afghan security forces on their allies from the US-led NATO occupation have claimed at least 26 lives, according to an AFP tally.

A number of Afghan security forces have been killed in similar attacks.

In early July three British soldiers were killed in neighboring Helmand province by a man wearing an Afghan police Uniform.

And in March, nine Afghan police were killed in the southern province of Uruzgan in an attack that authorities said was believed to have been facilitated by a fellow officer and suspected Taliban infiltrator.

The NATO coalition is to hand over security to local forces by mid-2013 and will play a support role up to the final withdrawal by the end of the following year.

(AFP)