Four Afghan civilians, including three children, were killed and three others wounded when an improvised bomb hit a vehicle in southern province of Uruzgan on Tuesday, the Interior Ministry said Wednesday.

"An Improvised Explosive Device (IED) placed by Taliban struck a civilian vehicle in Shahid Asas district, Uruzgan province at about 7 p.m. local time Tuesday. As a result three children and a man were martyred and three women were wounded," the ministry said in a statement.

The injured were shifted to a hospital by the police in the province 370 km south of Kabul, it added.

Taliban militants, who have been waging an insurgency for more than one decade, use IEDs to launch roadside bomb attack on security forces but the lethal weapon also inflicted casualties on civilians.

Also on Tuesday, three British soldiers with the NATO-led coalition forces died in an IED attack in neighboring Helmand province.

Taliban began their spring rebel offensive against the Afghan and more than 100,000 NATO-led troops over the weekend.

The Taliban-led insurgency and conflicts claimed the lives of more than 2,800 Afghan security forces and 402 foreign soldiers while leaving 2,754 civilians dead last year in the war-hit central Asian state.