Provincial governor takes gun from bodyguard and fires as last surviving attacker approached after 18 people killed in raid

A machine gun-wielding provincial governor took part in tackling a team of Taliban suicide bombers on Sunday when insurgents launched another brazen attack on a government facility in Afghanistan.

Officials said 18 people were killed, including three policemen and 10 local government workers, and 35 were wounded, some badly enough that they had to be transported to Kabul for treatment. A Taliban spokesman claimed credit for the violence in Charikar, a city where they had made barely any inroads in the last 10 years.

Abdul Basir Salangi, governor of Parwan, had been in his office holding a meeting with the province's police chief and Nato foreign advisers when the six-man insurgent squad drove up to the compound in a Toyota Corolla.

Various witnesses said one insurgent detonated a suicide device at a secured gate, allowing the rest of the group to enter the compound firing guns.

Other members of the squad were killed inside the compound, but a final survivor got close to the governor. Salangi, a former guerrilla commander who fought as an insurgent himself back in the 1980s, took a weapon from his bodyguard and fired at the attacker.

"The second attacker was shot in the corridor of the office by a policeman, and then three more were also killed inside the building," said Sher Ahmad Malatbani, the police chief. He said the final attacker was 15 metres away when he was shot before he could detonate his explosives.

Salangi, a close ally of Hamid Karzai, survived another assassination attempt earlier this month. The Afghan president condemned the latest attack and scolded "the enemies of Afghanistan" for killing civilians "even in the holy month of Ramadan".

There has been little support for the insurgency in the agricultural plains north of Kabul but the Taliban and allied groups have much to gain from sowing fear there. Charikar straddles a vital road that links Afghanistan to its Central Asian neighbours.

Engineer Zalmai, a local elder whose hand was damaged by bomb shrapnel, said the authorities must find out quickly whether the insurgents had received any local support and, if so, why.

"There are two problems that anger people: the joblessness and the fact that officials here are all appointed because whoever is appointed to the local administration only hires people who are their friends or relatives," he said.

The Taliban is waging a concerted effort to kill many leading Afghan officials, including some of Karzai's most important allies. In recent months suicide gunmen and suicide attackers have killed Ahmed Wali Karzai, a brother of the president, and other powerbrokers who have a vital for controlling the south of the country. In May General Daud Daud, one of the more effective regional police bosses, was killed by a suicide bomber in northern Afghanistan.