KABUL - Two separate landmine blasts in western Afghanistan Wednesday killed a US soldier and at least three civilians, officials said, a day before US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was due to visit.
The explosions were both near the major US base at Shindand, an old Russian airport littered with landmines from the previous 25 years of war, although officials did not rule out the possibility that militants planted the devices.
Four other US soldiers from a military police unit were also wounded in the first blast early Wednesday and eight Afghan civilians were hurt when the second explosion tore through a minibus hours later, officials said.
One US soldier sustained a severe back injury, one is currently in stable condition and two were treated and returned to duty, a US military statement said.
US military spokesman Major Steve Wollman told AFP that both explosions occured close together early on Wednesday although an earlier statement said the first blast had occurred Tuesday.
"We are still trying to determine whether it was an old mine or one that was recently placed," Wollman said, referring to the blast that killed the soldier.
Three US soldiers have now been killed in Afghanistan this year, with the previous two killed in hostile combat. At least 29 US soldiers were killed in combat in the war-torn country in 2004.
The Afghan victims were travelling in a minibus when the landmine detonated near Shindand airfield, Mohammadullah Afzali, spokesman for the provincial governor of Herat told AFP.
Shindand is located near the Iranian border, some 120 kilometers (74 miles) south of the main western city of Herat.
Afzali did not rule out the possibility that the blast was the result of a recently laid mine. "It could have been planted by the enemies of Afghanistan," he added.
The latest deaths come a day after officials said an Afghan soldier was killed and another wounded while searching for bodies from a plane which crashed into a mountain outside Kabul last month.
Afghanistan remains peppered with landmines after a decade-long fight against Soviet occupation in the 1980s, a civil war in the early 1990s, the US invasion of Afghanistan and subsequent insurgency by the ousted Taliban regime.
Rice, who is currently in Islamabad as part of a whirlwind Asian tour, is due to make a short trip to Afghanistan's capital Kabul on Thursday and will return the same day to Pakistan.
The US-led coalition has more than 18,000 soldiers in Afghanistan hunting down Taliban and Al-Qaeda militants, who continue to wage attacks on military and civilian targets.
Hours after the landmine blasts General Richard Myers, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters in Kabul that security in Afghanistan was now "very good throughout the country, exceptionally good".
The ultra-Islamic Taliban was toppled by US-led and Afghan forces at the end of 2001 after the regime refused to hand over Osama bin Laden in the wake of the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington.
However the US is due to pull its troops out of western Afghanistan this summer and move them to the Taliban heartland in the country's south and east.
03/16/2005 12:37 GMT