The head of the French Army in Afghanistan survived a Taleban rocket attack on a crowded market yesterday that killed 12 people and wounded 38.

Brigadier-General Marcel Druart was meeting tribal elders in Kapisa, 30 miles (50km) outside Kabul, when rockets hit a bazaar nearby. Witnesses said that the rockets landed within 200 metres (655ft) of the government building in Tagab Valley where the meeting was being held. The attack came a day after more than 700 French troops and 100 Afghan soldiers began an offensive in the area.

Troops said that the meeting, known as a shura, was the target, although no Nato troops were hurt.

A French captain, identified only as Michel, said that three of the dead were children. Three American Black Hawks and a French Caracal helicopter evacuated the most seriously wounded to a military hospital at Bagram airbase.

The Taleban claimed responsibility for the attack but admitted that they did not know who was in the meeting. “Our soldiers knew there were foreign forces in Tagab and they attacked them,” Zabiullah Mujahed, a spokesman for the Taleban, said.

Brigadier-General Druart, 53, who has served in Lebanon, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Albania, was evacuated to the French headquarters. Nato forces said that they found the rocket launch site and retaliated with artillery. Sporadic shelling could be heard later.

Nato forces have patrol bases in the Tagab Valley but troops have struggled for control. In September two French soldiers were killed and eight wounded by a roadside bomb.

In southern Afghanistan, militants attacked a police checkpoint in Kandahar overnight, killing at least three policemen and wounding six, the police criminal director of Kandahar, Pashton Moamand, said. A police official from the Argandab district where the attack occurred said, however, that eight policemen were killed and three wounded.

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