Kabul: Three NATO soldiers, three Afghan security guards and 12 Taliban militants were killed in separate attacks in the volatile southern Afghanistan, officials said on Monday.

Two NATO-led British soldiers were killed while conducting a patrol in the southern province of Helmand late Sunday when they were caught in a roadside explosion, the British Defence Ministry said in a statement.

The British soldiers were part of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), which has around 43,000 troops from some 39 countries in the war-hit Afghanistan.

"The soldiers were airlifted to the medical facility at Camp Bastion and one soldier was pronounced dead on arrival and the other died subsequently," the ISAF in Kabul said in a statement, without identifying the nationalities of the deceased soldiers.

The third NATO soldier, a Dane, was killed and two others were wounded in a fight with insurgents in southern region, ISAF said.

In another incident, three Afghan security guards working for a road construction company in Zherai district of Kandahar were killed when a roadside bomb struck their vehicle, said Neyaz Mohammad Sarhadi, the district chief.

Taliban militants, meanwhile, took responsibility for the attack in a statement posted on their website, and claimed to have killed or wounded 10 British soldiers in the roadside attacks.

"A tank of British forces was blown up by mine in Kajaki district of the province around 6 pm on Sunday," the Taliban statement said, adding that another tank, which arrived at the scene to evacuate the soldiers, was also blown up by a remote-controlled mine.

Meanwhile, the Afghan defence ministry claimed in a statement that their forces backed by international troops killed at least 10 suspected Taliban militants including their local commander, Mullah Qaseem, in Zabul province on Saturday.

The combined forces detained three other militants, during the engagement, it said. In the neighbouring Kandahar province Sunday, the army soldiers killed two militants and wounded another three in an operation in Houz Madad area of the province, the statement added.

Source : IANS