Afghanistan: Taliban's Kandahar raid into second day

Afghan government troops are seeking to mop up Taliban resistance

Afghan security forces are battling Taliban insurgents for a second successive day inside the southern city of Kandahar.

Two security personnel and three civilians have been killed, and 46 other people have been injured.
Police say they have killed 14 Taliban fighters, some of them Pakistanis.
The Taliban deny the attacks are a response to the death of Osama Bin Laden, saying they had been planned for some time.
Saturday saw the insurgents launch co-ordinated assaults with suicide bombers and rocket-propelled grenades targeting government buildings.
In one area of the city, gunmen in a four-storey shopping centre exchanged fire with security forces in a compound belonging to Governor Tooryalai Wesa.
On Sunday, heavy machine-gun fire and explosions could still be heard in Kandahar as Afghan forces - aided by Nato-led foreign troops - sought to mop up remaining pockets of Taliban resistance.
The city's streets are virtually empty of people, with Taliban fighters firing guns and rockets from a traffic police building and a hotel they are still occupying.
"It is a complicated building, that is why it has taken a while to clear up but soon we will clear the building of the enemy," Kandahar border police commander General Abdul Razeq said.
Governor Wesa - who earlier promised that the Taliban fighters would be killed "one by one" - said the insurgents were putting up heavy resistance.
The BBC's Bilal Sarwary, in the Afghan capital Kabul, says this is the worse attack in Kandahar province since the fall of the Taliban government in 2001, and a embarrassment for the Western-backed Afghan government.
'Spectacular' Afghan President Hamid Karzai has said the militants are attacking civilians to hide their defeat, caused by the killing of Osama Bin Laden.

But Taliban spokesman Yusuf Ahmadi said the Kandahar attacks had been planned for some time as part of the insurgents' annual "spring offensive", announced last week, and had nothing to do with Bin Laden's death.
A spokesman for the International Security Assistance Force (Isaf), Major General James Laster, described it as a "spring offensive spectacular attack which was thwarted".
There are about 130,000 international troops in Afghanistan, the majority of them from the US.
Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban and a hotbed of the insurgency, has been the focus of military operations by government and international forces over the past year.
A senior Kandahar police official has blamed the attacks on last month's escape by about 500 prisoners, many of them Taliban, from the main jail in the city.
Source BBC NEWS