Rocket barrage hits Kabul after motorcycle-riding bomber kills six US troops near Bagram airbase.

In the deadliest attack on foreign troops since August, six US soldiers were killed in Afghanistan on Monday when a suicide attacker rammed an explosives-laden motorcycle into a joint NATO-Afghan patrol.

The soldiers were targeted as they moved through a village near Bagram Airfield, the largest US military facility in Afghanistan, NATO and Afghan officials said.

“We’re deeply saddened by this loss,” said Shoffner.

A US official confirmed that all NATO troops killed were American. Two wounded were also US soldiers and the other was Afghan.

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack.

In New York, Police Commissioner William Bratton said on Monday that a New York City police detective, Joseph Lemm, was one of the six Americans killed in the attack.

Lemm was a 15-year veteran of the New York Police Department and worked in the Bronx Warrant Squad.

Bratton says Lemm served in the US National Guard and, while a member of the police force, he had been deployed twice to Afghanistan and once to Iraq.

He leaves behind a wife and three children.