It was not immediately clear why the helicopter crashed in the Sangin district of Helmand province, where US, British and Afghan forces are pressing assaults against Taliban strongholds in the south ahead of key elections.

"At around 9:00 am (0430 GMT) this morning, a private helicopter has crashed outside Sangin military base... we have at least six people killed," said a spokesman for the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).

"The passengers were all civilians," he added, speaking from the biggest NATO base in southern Afghanistan at Kandahar.

Another ISAF spokesman said the aircraft was carrying civilian contractors, but their nationalities were not immediately known and it was not clear how many people were on board.

Daud Ahmadi, a spokesman for the Helmand provincial administration, said an Afghan child was killed and a man injured near the site of the crash.

Ahmadi could not give further details but "the child and the man were not part of the passengers, they were from a nearby village and killed as a result of the helicopter crash," he told AFP.

Fazul Haq, head of the local administration in Sangin, told AFP that he saw the chopper catch fire and crash.

"I was on the rooftop of a building when I saw a helicopter... Suddenly, about two kilometres from a foreign forces' base in Sangin I saw the chopper catch fire, then crash down," he said.

"Even now I can see flames and smoke," he added, speaking to AFP by telephone from the remote southern district.

A spokesman for the Taliban, which is waging an increasingly deadly insurgency against Western troops and the Afghan government, claimed that its fighters shot down the helicopter.

The Taliban frequently make claims and exaggerate their prowess in statements that are impossible to confirm.

"It was a Chinook helicopter and we brought it down," the spokesman, Yousuf Ahmadi, told AFP by telephone.

Meanwhile the administration for civil aviation in Moldova issued a statement saying a civilian Mi-26 helicopter of Moldavian aviation firm Pecotox-Air was hit Tuesday morning by a missile in Afghanistan.

The incident occurred around 8:00 am local time while the chopper was carrying out a humanitarian mission under the aegis of the international coalition in Afghanistan, it said.

On board were six team members, all Ukraine nationals. It said there were believed to be fatalities but the information was being confirmed.

The authority did not say where the helicopter came down and it was unclear if the statement was referring to the same incident as the Sangin crash, which comes a week after one British and two Canadian soldiers were killed when their Ch-146 Griffon helicopter crashed on take-off in Afghanistan.

Canadian military officials said the crash on July 6, also in the south of the country, was likely caused by mechanical failure, not enemy fire.

Afghanistan has seen a surge of violence in recent weeks, as the country prepares to go to the polls for landmark presidential and provincial council elections on August 20.

With the nearly eight-year insurgency at its deadliest, the United States has dispatched up to an extra 21,000 soldiers in a bid to stabilise the country ahead of the vote.

Military casualties have surged in recent weeks as about 4,000 US Marines and thousands of British and Afghan forces battle their way into Taliban strongholds in the south in separate assaults launched about three weeks ago.

There are about 90,000 international troops, mainly US, British and Canadian, deployed in Afghanistan to help Kabul defeat the Taliban insurgency which followed the 2001 US-led invasion to oust their Kabul regime.

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