(BRUSSELS) - The European Union's foreign policy chief Javier Solana Tuesday denounced a military ambush in Afghanistan which claimed the lives of 10 French soldiers as "a disgraceful and barbaric act."

"The attack perpetrated against the French soldiers deployed in Afghanistan constitutes a disgraceful and barbaric act," he said.

"These soldiers were serving the cause of liberty and democracy," he said. "It is for these values that they gave up their lives," Europe's top diplomat said.

"I bow before their sacrifice. Their courage does France and the whole of Europe proud," he said, paying tribute to their "determination to serve the cause which they so nobly defended in Afghanistan."

The troops were killed during fighting on Monday and Tuesday following a Taliban ambush near Kabul that also left 21 French soldiers wounded, in the worst battlefield toll for foreign troops since the 2001 fall of the Taliban.

NATO is supporting the weak government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai and fighting an insurgency led by the Taliban movement which was ousted from Kabul in late 2001.

The latest casualties brings to 24 the number of French troops killed in action or in accidents in Afghanistan since French soldiers were first sent there in 2002.

It was the deadliest attack on French troops since a 1983 assault in Beirut in which 58 French paratroopers serving in a UN force were killed.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy praised the "courage of these men who accomplished their duty until the supreme sacrifice."

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