Agence France-Presse . Kandahar

A Taliban suicide car bomb aimed at Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan killed 37 civilians Monday, a day after another suicide blast left more than 100 dead in the country's deadliest such attack.

The NATO-led International Security Assistance Force said three of its soldiers were also wounded in the powerful suicide blast Monday in Spin Boldak, a busy market town near the Pakistan border.

It would not comment on the nationality of the troops but Kandahar province governor Asadullah Khalid told reporters they were Canadians. 'The suicide attacker detonated near a Canadian military convoy. In the attack 37 civilians were killed, 30 civilians were wounded and also three Canadian troops were wounded,' Khalid said.

A spokesman for the extremist Taliban movement said his group had carried out the blast, which is similar to scores carried out by extremists who were in government between 1996 and 2001.

The attack came a day after a suicide bomber blew himself up in a crowd of hundreds of men and boys watching a dog fighting competition outside Kandahar city, killing more than 100 people. It was the deadliest suicide blast since the fall of the Taliban regime in a US-led invasion.

The Taliban were behind most of around 140 suicide attacks last year, the deadliest of the insurgency. Khalid said Monday the target of Sunday's blast was an anti-Taliban militia commander, Abdul Hakim Jan, who had been at the dog fight.

The commander had been warned that his life was under threat from the Taliban, the governor told hundreds of people packed into a mosque for a ceremony to mourn Jan. 'We told him a week ago that a suicide bomber was looking for him. He said 'I cannot hide, what should I do?' he said.

Afghan officials blamed the extremist Taliban for the attack. But a spokesman for the movement, Yousuf Ahmadi, rejected Taliban involvement, suggesting the motive was infighting among pro-government commanders.

Sunday's bombing was condemned by the United Nations and several Western countries which have a military presence in the war-ravaged country.

The UN Security Council underlined in a statement 'the need to bring perpetrators, organisers, financiers and sponsors of this reprehensible act of terrorism to justice.' The British ministry of defence announced Monday that one of its soldiers was killed Sunday in another explosion in the southern province of Helmand, which sees some of the worst violence of the Taliban-led insurgency.

The soldier was killed and another wounded when they were caught in a blast while on foot patrol in Helmand province's Kajaki area, the ministry of defence said in a statement its website.

The new casualty took to 16 the number of international soldiers killed in Afghanistan this year. Most of them have been US nationals but the toll includes Canadian, British, Dutch and Italian troops.

There are around 43,000 soldiers in the 40-nation force which is deployed to Afghanistan under a UN mandate. Besides assisting Afghan troops and fighting the Taliban, ISAF also runs 25 reconstruction teams around the country.