Declan Walsh in Islamabad guardian.co.uk, Sunday 26 June 2011 19.13 BST

Taliban insurgents used an eight-year-old girl carrying a bag of explosives to attack a police checkpost in central Afghanistan, the Afghan government said on Sunday, making her one of the youngest child bombers of the decade-old conflict.

The incident took place in Char Chino district of central Uruzgan province, the interior ministry said. "The insurgents handed over a bag with a homemade bomb to an eight-year-old girl and asked her to take it to police forces," it added.

"As the girl was getting close to the police, it exploded and killed the girl."

It was the latest in a string of unusual attacks on both sides of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

On Saturday a Taliban car bomber attacked a hospital in a remote district of eastern Logar province, damaging the maternity ward and killing between 20 and 35 people, according to reports.

Around the same time in north-western Pakistan, the Pakistani Taliban deployed a married couple who attacked a police station by blowing themselves up. Two burqa-clad figures made their way into a police station in Kolachi, near the Taliban hub of South Waziristan, pretending to want to lodge a complaint, police said...........


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