NEARLY 100 KILLED IN AMBULANCE BLAST IN AFGHAN CAPITAL KABUL
A bomb hidden in an
ambulance killed at least 100 people and wounded about 170 in the Afghan
capital Kabul on Saturday when it blew up at a police checkpoint in a busy part
of the city that was crowded with pedestrians at the time of the attack.
The Taliban claimed
responsibility for the suicide blast, a week after they claimed an attack on
the Intercontinental Hotel in which more than 23 people were killed.
An interior ministry
spokesman blamed the Haqqani network, a militant group affiliated with the
Taliban which Afghan and Western officials consider to be behind many of the
biggest attacks on urban targets in Afghanistan.
As medical teams
struggled to handle the casualties pouring in, some of the wounded were laid
out in the open, with intravenous drips set up next to them in hospital
gardens.
“It’s a massacre,”
said Dejan Panic, coordinator in Afghanistan for the Italian aid group
Emergency, which runs a nearby trauma hospital that treated dozens of wounded.
Hours after the
blast, a health ministry spokesman said the casualty toll had risen to at least
100 killed and 170 wounded.
The latest attack
will add pressure on President Ashraf Ghani and his U.S. allies, who have
expressed growing confidence that a new more aggressive military strategy has
succeeded in driving Taliban insurgents back from major provincial centers.
“Today’s attack is
nothing short of an atrocity, and those who have organized and enabled it must
be brought to justice and held to account,” Tadamichi Yamamoto, head of the
United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, said in a statement.
The United States
has stepped up its assistance to Afghan security forces and increased its air
strikes against the Taliban and other militant groups, aiming to break a
stalemate and force the insurgents to the negotiating table.
However, the Taliban
have dismissed suggestions they have been weakened by the new strategy, and the
past week has shown their capacity to mount deadly, high-profile attacks is
undiminished, even in the heavily protected center of Kabul.
The U.S.-led
international force in Afghanistan vowed its support for the Afghan government
and armed forces in their “difficult and dangerous work”, adding that none of
its members had been killed or wounded in the blast.
AMBULANCE AT CHECKPOINT
Saturday is a
working day in Afghanistan and the streets were full when the blast went off at
around lunchtime in a busy part of the city close to shops and markets and near
a number of foreign embassies and government buildings.
Mirwais Yasini, a
member of parliament who was nearby when the explosion occurred, said an
ambulance approached the checkpoint and blew up. The target was apparently an
interior ministry building but the victims were mainly people who happened to
be in the street.
Buildings hundreds
of meters away were shaken by the force of the blast, which left torn bodies
strewn on the street amid piles of rubble, debris and wrecked cars.
The casualty toll is
the worst since 150 people were killed in a truck bomb explosion last May near
the German embassy, an attack that prompted a major reinforcement of security
aimed at preventing similar vehicle-borne attacks.
With much of central
Kabul now a heavily fortified zone of high concrete blast walls and police
checkpoints, there were angry questions about how the bomber had been able to
get through and set off the blast.
“Officials must be
held responsible,” said former deputy Interior Minister Mohammad Ayub Salangi.
News Source : Reuters
News Source : Reuters
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