Around 1,000 Afghans took to the streets Thursday in the town of Qalat in Zabul province near Kandahar, to denounce the massacre that a US soldier committed there on Sunday by killing 16 civilians including 9 children.

Around 1,000 Afghans took to the streets Thursday in the town of Qalat in Zabul province near Kandahar, to denounce the massacre that a US soldier committed there on Sunday, killing 16 civilians including 9 children.

Police said the crowd shouted anti-American slogans and demanded a public trial for the shooter, a US Army sergeant who served three tours in Iraq and was flown outside Afghanistan to Kuwait after the massacre.

The protest, which was the second after the massacre, came on the second day of US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s visit to Afghanistan.

Panetta was due to meet President Hamid Karzai on Thursday, having insisted that “troubling events should not force a change in NATO's war strategy”, considering that “progress was being made in the 10-year war against the Taliban.”

In parallel, an Afghan was killed Thursday after “trying to ram a truck at US Marines waiting to greet the Pentagon chief.”

According to US officials, “an Afghan interpreter hijacked a pick-up truck from a soldier and drove it at a group of US Marines on the airfield tarmac, before it crashed and burst into flames.”

The Marines he tried to run over "were assembled to meet the secretary of defense’s plane", a military official told reporters on condition of anonymity.

For his part, General Mike Scaparotti said earlier that “the Afghan, who was engulfed in flames after crashing the vehicle, had a container of fuel in the car.”

However, he assured that “there were no explosives in the vehicle and the person had no explosive vest on him,” pointing out that a British occupation soldier was injured “in the course of the theft" of the vehicle”.