KABUL -- Six Afghan soldiers and a driver for a U.S. aid agency were killed in a raid by suspected Taleban guerrillas and the fundamentalist group said it had killed five government soldiers in separate attack.

The death toll would be the biggest for a single day attributed to a resurgent Taliban guerrilla movement in many months, although local government officials denied the latter incident had been an attack and gave no casualty figure for it.

In Kabul, meanwhile, state television said police had discovered five Soviet-designed rockets primed to fire in a district just south of the capital that was once a base of a warlord who used to bombard the city with rockets.

The attack that killed the aid worker from Mercy Corps came just before dawn on a remote district headquarters in Deshu in the troubled southern province of Helmand not far from the Pakistani border, the deputy provincial police chief told Reuters.

"Six army soldiers and a driver for Mercy Corps lost their lives in the incident, which happened after morning prayers," Mohammad Ayoub told Reuters.

He said the soldiers were killed in a gun battle resisting the raid. He did not know if any of the attackers, whom he described as Taleban guerrillas, had been killed.

Rod Volway, head of the Mercy Corps office in the neighboring province of Kandahar, confirmed that a driver for the agency, Raz Mohammad, had been killed.

He said three Afghan employees of the agency had been in Deshu conducting an assessment for an agricultural project. The two others were safe and Mercy Corps was withdrawing them and two other teams from the area.

Volway said that from the reports he had, it appeared the district office, not the aid workers, had been the target. Mercy Corps has headquarters in the United States and Scotland.

Separately in Kandahar province Taliban guerrillas said they had killed five Afghan government soldiers and wounded three in a rocket attack on their vehicle some 25 km (15 miles) north of the town of Spin Boldak, also near the Pakistani border. --- Blasts Heard, Flames Seen ---

"Their vehicle was totally destroyed and the Taleban left the area after the attack," Mullah Abdul Samad, an intelligence official in the regime overthrown in 2001, told Reuters by satellite phone from an undisclosed location.

Lal Mohammad, a farmer in the area, told Reuters he saw the vehicle in flames after the attack in the Mail Pul area and reported hearing explosions from rocket fire. He said he also saw Afghan soldiers removing dead and injured from the scene. "I heard the blasts and saw the flames rising," he said.

However, Khalid Khan Achakzai, a provincial Foreign Ministry official, said the vehicle had overturned and denied it was a Taleban attack. He said he had no details of casualties.

In further evidence of an increasingly bold Taleban movement, four government soldiers were wounded in an attack on a government post 70 km (44 miles) from Kandahar, Akram Khakraiz Wal, a senior police officer in the city, said.

The report of the discovery of five BM-16 rockets about 15 km (10 miles) south of Kabul came days before NATO is due to take command next Monday of the international peacekeeping force helping to provide security in the capital.

When the current German-Dutch command of International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) took over in February, German Defense Minister Peter Struck was forced to take cover in a bunker after two rockets landed near the base where the ceremony took place. Struck is due to attend Monday's handover ceremony.

Southern Afghanistan was the main heartland of the Taleban until it was toppled by U.S.-led forces in late 2001.

As Taleban remnants have regrouped, the region has been the scene of repeated attacks this year in which more than 100 government soldiers and civilians have been killed or wounded.

Afghan and U.S.-led coalition forces pursuing Taleban guerrillas complain their job is made more difficult by the ability of Taleban and allied guerrillas to seek safety by crossing into the rugged borderlands of Pakistan, the main Taleban supporter until 2001.