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KANDAHAR, Afghanistan - A road mine blasted a bus carrying a wedding party in southern Afghanistan on Saturday, killing 10 civilians, a police official said.

Enlarge Photo

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS/Arshad Butt

Afghan refugees stand beside their injured relative Sultan Muhammad, a victim of a mine blast in the Afghan border town Spin Boldak, at a local hospital in Quetta, Pakistan on Saturday, Aug. 2, 2008.

Provincial police chief Matiullah Khan blamed Taliban militants for planting the explosive in Spin Boldak district of the southern Kandahar province.

Khan said the bride and groom were among the dead, but an AP Television News cameraman later interviewed the relatives of a wounded, unconscious man who was said to be the groom. It was not immediately possible to reconcile the accounts late Saturday.

Six were wounded, and Khan said that children were among the victims.

A Taliban-led insurgency has engulfed much of southern and eastern Afghanistan, with more than 2,700 people - mostly militants - killed this year, according to an Associated Press tally of figures from Afghan and western officials.

Meanwhile, officials said that U.S.-led coalition troops used air strikes to kill more than a dozen Taliban fighters in southern Afghanistan. The troops were in a joint patrol with Afghan forces when their convoy was struck by a roadside bomb in Uruzgan province on Friday, the coalition said in a statement.

The joint force retaliated against the attackers and also called in the air strikes, it said. There were no casualties among Afghan or coalition troops.

Militants regularly attack Afghan and foreign troops with roadside bombs. The number of insurgent attacks in eastern Afghanistan, which borders Pakistan, has risen by 40 per cent this year over the same period in 2007.