Taliban forces 8-year-old girl into suicide bombing

Taliban militants forced an 8-year-old girl to carry a bag filled with explosives to an Afghan police checkpoint where it went off and killed her, authorities said.

No one else was hurt, but the chilling episode is believed to have involved the youngest child ever used in a suicide attack in Afghanistan.

The incident happened Saturday in central Uruzgan province, the Interior Ministry said.

\"The insurgents handed over a bag with a homemade bomb to an eight-year-old girl and asked her to take it to police forces,\" the ministry said in a statement, the Guardian newspaper reported.

\"As the girl was getting close to the police, it exploded and killed the girl.\"

The Taliban has denied using child bombers, but Afghan govement officials say it has periodically occurred.

The assault was one of several shocking bombings in the past week on both sides of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

On Saturday, a husband-and-wife team of suicide bombers attacked a police station in Pakistan, killing eight officers and two civilians.

The same day, Taliban militants detonated a massive car bomb outside the mateity ward of an Afghan hospital, killing as many as 35 people.

Last week, police in Pakistan managed to defuse a bomb strapped to a 9-year-old girl who said she had been kidnapped and sent towards a checkpoint.

\"They told me: 'You keep on reciting Koranic verses till you push the button',\" she told authorities.