By KUNA,
London : A British soldier was killed in an explosion while checking for mines in southern Afghanistan, the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defence (MoD) said on Wednesday.
The soldier, from the Parachute Regiment, was killed as he got out of his vehicle in the Upper Sangin Valley, Helmand Province, on Tuesday.
The MoD said next of kin had been informed. No one else was injured.
The number of British troops to have died during operations in the country since 2001 is now 108.
An MoD spokesman confirmed the death “with great sadness”.
This was the second British soldier to have died Tuesday. Another soldier from the Parachute Regiment, who has not yet been named, died during a firefight in Helmand Province.
Eleven British service personnel have been killed in Afghanistan since 8 June, seven of them from the Parachute Regiment.
The latest death came as the head of the UK armed forces warned that building up Afghanistan from its present “medieval” status would take decades.
The Chief of the Defence Staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup, speaking before the death was announced, said that while the military would need to be in the country for “some years”, the civilian reconstruction effort would take much longer.
He said long-term success depended on establishing effective civilian governance, which he said was a “gradual process”.
“This is not something that could be done in one, two, or three years because we are talking about a country that is essentially medieval, that has very little in the way of infrastructure, very little in the way of human resource, that has an endemic culture of corruption”, the Chief of the Defence Staff added.
There are more than 7,000 British soldiers in Afghanistan, the majority in the troubled southern Helmand Province.