Two suicide blasts wound 16 in Afghanistan

KHOST—Two suicide bombers, one targeting a U.S.-led coalition convoy and another Afghan soldiers, blew themselves up in the southeastern province of Khost on Thursday, wounding 16 people.
And two men on a motorcycle threw two hand grenades at the Indian consulate in the southern city of Kandahar, but no one was hurt, police said.
One grenade landed on the lawn of the compound and the second hit a police guardpost, a police officer said, adding the attackers were Taliban. Kandahar is the birthplace of the Islamist group.
This is the bloodiest year in Afghanistan since coalition forces overthrew the Islamist Taliban government in 2001.
In Khost, one attacker hurled himself on a carload of Afghan troops a few hundred meters from the provincial governor's office in Khost city and the second used a car against the U.S.-led troops on a road south of the city.
A coalition spokesman said no one in the convoy attack was hurt. A Taliban spokesman said there were several casualties.
Officials and witnesses said 14 civilians and two Afghan soldiers were wounded in the two Khost attacks.
Taliban rebels have carried out scores of suicide bombings against foreign and Afghan forces in Kabul and across the nation.
About 200 people, most of them civilians, have died in the attacks, rare until this year, NATO figures show.
But suicide bombings are still not as common as in Iraq.
More than 2,500 people, most of them militants but including more than 140 foreign soldiers, have died in the Taliban-led insurgency and operations by foreign forces this year.
In Kabul, authorities freed 16 exhausted but happy prisoners recently handed over by the United States after being released from its Guantanamo Bay military prison in Cuba.
Many, some wearing green hospital-style ID tags, complained of mistreatment. They had been detained as suspected fighters from the Taliban or its allies during or after the 2001 war.—Agencies