3 Afghan police officials fired

KABUL, AFGHANISTAN —  The Afghan government announced Thursday that it had fired three senior police officials in the southern province of Kandahar, two weeks after the Taliban staged a spectacular prison break that freed hundreds of militants.

Insurgents freed in the June 13 assault on Kandahar’s main jail quickly joined ranks with local Taliban fighters and briefly overran part of a strategic district close to the city. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization had to rush in hundreds of troops last week to flush them out.

Meanwhile, three soldiers with the U.S.-led military coalition and their interpreter were killed while on patrol south of Kabul, the capital, military officials said. Foreign troop deaths in Afghanistan have been surging, and U.S. deaths here last month exceeded those in Iraq.

The nationalities of the troops killed in Thursday’s bombing of a military convoy were not immediately disclosed.

American military authorities provided little detail about the attack in Wardak province, about 40 miles west of Kabul, other than to say that two of the bodies had been recovered and that the area had been secured.

The Associated Press reported that a freelance cameraman had filmed the aftermath of the attack, with the video showing flaming wreckage on a mountain road and triumphant insurgents brandishing ammunition and an assault rifle like those used by U.S.-led forces.

The firing of three senior police officials in the wake of the Kandahar prison break underscored how damaging the incident was considered by the Afghan government.

The well-coordinated assault rattled area residents’ confidence in the government of President Hamid Karzai, raising new fear about the strength of the insurgency more than six years after the Taliban movement was toppled in a U.S.-led invasion.

The provincial police chief, Sayed Agha Saqib, was among those dismissed. The Interior Ministry said in a statement that Saqib’s case had been referred to the prosecutor’s office and that he could face charges of being “negligent in his duties.”

Although insurgent-fueled violence has been concentrated in Afghanistan’s south and east, near the border with Pakistan, the attack in Wardak province showed Taliban fighters’ ability to strike close to the capital as well.

Kabul has been hit by several major attacks this year, including an assassination attempt against Karzai.

The Afghan president has repeatedly accused Pakistan of permitting the free passage of fighters into Afghanistan. Pakistan pledged Wednesday to do more to try to halt cross-border attacks, but Pakistani officials Thursday angrily denied assertions by a spokesman for Afghanistan’s intelligence service that Pakistan’s main spy agency had been involved in the attack on Karzai at a military ceremony two months ago.

Pakistan has been struggling on its own side of the frontier to contain a rising insurgency, which has increasingly spilled out of the semiautonomous tribal belt and into “settled” areas purportedly under government control.

Authorities in the Swat Valley, 100 miles north of the capital, Islamabad, said Thursday that militants had set fire to the country’s only ski resort. The mountaintop hotel complex, owned by the government, was empty at the time.

Insurgents in Swat agreed this year to a truce with the government, but that pact appears to be in tatters. The militants, who oppose education for girls as un-Islamic, have burned down nearly a dozen girls schools in the last two days, local officials said.

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laura.king@latimes.com

Special correspondent Faiez reported from Kabul and Times staff writer King from Islamabad. Special correspondent Zulfiqar Ali in Peshawar, Pakistan, contributed to this report.