Afghans killed two US occupation soldiers on Thursday in the southern province of Kandahar.

Afghans killed two US occupation soldiers on Thursday in the southern province of Kandahar.

An Afghan official said the troops were Americans and they were killed at a military outpost in Kandahar.

NATO's US-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) didn’t revealed the nationalities of the soldiers, adding they were killed when a man "believed to be an Afghan National Army service member" and another in civilian clothing turned their weapons on them.

The civilian was a literacy teacher working in the outpost who grabbed a weapon from a soldier and opened fire, Zhary district chief Niaz Mohammad Sarhadi told Agence France Press.
Other troops returned fire, killing the teacher and an Afghan army soldier, Sarhadi said.

An Afghan source working with ISAF said "an investigation was ongoing" into whether the latest killings were connected to burning copies of the holy Quran last week.

Popular outrage erupted after Afghans learned that copies of Islam's holy book were thrown into an incinerator pit at the US-run Bagram airbase, leading US President Barack Obama to apologize for what he described as an "error".

Some 40 people were killed in six days of protests against the move.