KANDAHAR (Afghanistan) - A SUICIDE car bomber killed five people at a police checkpoint in southern Afghanistan on Saturday and a rocket attack in the capital killed three civilians, officials said.

There were no claims of responsibility for the attacks but they appeared linked to an extremist Islamic insurgency that has grown steadily since the hardline Taleban group was removed from government in 2001.

The suicide attacker drove an explosives-filled vehicle to the checkpoint in the southern province of Kandahar, where police were searching cars, and then detonated his bombs, police said.

'Initial assessments show that three policemen and two civilians are killed. Four police and a civilian are wounded,' local police commander Mohammad Akbar said. The civilians were two men on a motorbike, he said.

Another five people were wounded in the blast which was outside the southern city of Kandahar on the key road leading to Herat in the west.

Canadian soldiers serving with a Nato-led military force were metres (yards) away at the time of the blast. They helped to evacuate the wounded.

A Canadian soldier was killed and three others wounded in a bomb blast in the nearby Zhari district on Friday.

There were also two suicide car bombs in western Afghanistan on Friday.

Only the attackers were killed in the blasts, although three foreigners were wounded in an attack in Herat.

Late on Saturday, a rocket fired into the Afghan capital Kabul landed on a home near the city's police academy and killed three people, a police commander and witnesses said.

Another rocket was also launched into the western residential neighbourhood but caused no casualties, they said.

'One of the rockets has landed on a house and has killed three people and wounded another three,' a city police chief, General Alishah Paktiawal, said. He could not identify the casualties but said they included women.

The rocket destroyed one room of the home, which was about 100 metres (yards) from the police school, said an AFP photographer at the scene.

People from the area said the dead were all women, he said.

It was not clear who had fired the rockets.

Kabul has suffered several deadly suicide attacks blamed on the Taleban.

Rockets are also launched into the city every few months but they rarely kill people.

The US military, which provides most of the nearly 70,000 international troops helping Afghan forces, announced meanwhile that soldiers had killed six suspected militants in the southern province of Helmand on Thursday.

The men were seen collecting weapons from a cache and had shown 'hostile intent', it said in a statement on Saturday. Their identities could not be independently verified. -- AFP