The suicide bomb belt lies beside the body of the man shot in Lashkar Gar in Southern Helmand today.

Among the trail of clothes around him is the women's burqa with which he had disguised himself as he set out, explosives strapped to his chest, towards the police compound that was his target.

“He was shot in the forehead after he ignored warning shots and was killed on the spot,” said Hussain Andiwal, provincial police chief. “When we took off his burqa we found he was a man with a suicide vest tied around his body.”

“It was an 18 volt battery concealed under his clothes,” said a spokesman for ISAF, the International Security Assistance Force.

The latest suicide attack follows the death of three British servicemen from the 2nd Battalion The Parachute Regiment last weekend. In that incident a 12 man platoon spotted an Afghan man behaving oddly ahead of them as they returned from a patrol to their remote operating base, known as Inkerman, north of Sangin in Helmand province.

When Private Daniel Gamble, one of the regiment’s small number of Pashtu speakers, approached him to ask him what he was doing, the man reached under his cloak and detonated a concealed explosive vest, killing Private Gamble instantly and fatally wounding two other members of the patrol.

On this occasion, however, the Afghan officers guarding the compound shot the man after he refused to freeze and instead started running towards the building, according to Mr Andiwal. The explosives were never successfully detonated and there were no other casualties.

“What we are seeing is that asymmetric attacks are increasing – they’re going for district governors and civilian convoys instead of foreign troops or NATO troops,” said the ISAF spokesman. “They’ve been pushed out of parts of southern Afghanistan so they’ve had to switch tactics.”

The Taliban have not yet claimed to be behind the attack, although they are usually keener to claim successful attacks, said the spokesman.

Helmand is traditionally a focus for Taliban insurgents. In January a suicide bomber blew himself up in a crowded mosque close to the same police headquarters in Laskar Gar, killing six. Last week a BBC reporter in Helmand, Abdol Samad Rohani, was abducted and later killed.

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