Three soldiers of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), who were shot dead by a man wearing an Afghan National Police uniform in southern Afghanistan on Sunday, were identified as Britons.
Reports quoting Britain's Ministry of Defense said on Monday that two of the killed troopers served with the 1st Battalion Welsh Guards and the third with the Royal Corps of Signals.
ISAF said in a statement on Sunday that the gunman was injured and later taken into custody. It is investigating the incident, which took the number of foreign troops killed in Afghanistan this year to 223.
As many as 419 British soldiers had been killed in operations against insurgents in Afghanistan since 2001.
The weekend shooting was the latest in a series of incidents this year in Afghanistan of civilians, disguised as Afghan security personnel, or Afghan soldiers themselves targeting ISAF personnel.
Burning of copies of the Holy Koran at a U.S. airbase in February had inflamed anti-Western sentiments in Afghanistan, and massacre of 16 Afghan civilians by a U.S. soldier in March further fueled them.
Britain has the second largest foreign military contingent in Afghanistan. The southern province of Helmand still remains a Taliban stronghold, where most of the 9,500 British soldiers fight the militants as Task Force Helmand.
A NATO summit in Chicago earlier this year had decided on a new NATO-led mission which will focus on training, advising and assisting Afghan forces after they have assumed full security responsibility across the country by the end of 2014.
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