Thirteen people were killed, mostly police, when a suicide bomber loyal to the ousted Taliban regime blew himself up at the police headquarters in Kandahar, Afghanistan, on Tuesday, officials said.
A man claiming to be a spokesperson for the Taliban militia, which was ousted in late 2001 and is now waging an insurgency against the new government, said the radical Sunni Muslim movement was responsible for the blast.
The interior ministry in Kabul confirmed the attack was a suicide bombing and said it was the work of the Taliban and its allies in the al-Qaeda terrorist network.
”A suicide bomber wanted to get into the headquarters and while police were searching for him he detonated the bomb, which killed 13 people, among which seven are police and six civilians,” ministry spokesperson Yousuf Stanizai said.
He said another 13 people — eight civilians and five police — were wounded in the latest in a series of suicide attacks to rock the war-shattered nation.
”The suicide bomber was totally blown into pieces. This is the work of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, the enemies of peace and development in Afghanistan,” Stanizai added.
A doctor at the Kandahar public health hospital confirmed that 13 people had died, although he said 11 were wounded, most of them critically.
Police and Canadian soldiers with the United States-led coalition force in Afghanistan immediately sealed off the area.
A witness also said he believed the blast was a suicide attack, although he said he thought the bomber was on a motorcycle that struck at the gates of the police headquarters as a crowd had gathered to enter.
”I saw two foreign nationals in civilian clothes enter the police headquarters. As soon as they got in, police closed the headquarters’ gates where a big number of people were waiting to get in,” he said, requesting anonymity.
”That was when I saw a big explosion from a motorbike and a person riding it — that is why I think it is a suicide attack.”
Purported Taliban spokesperson Qari Yousuf Ahmadi said: ”It was carried out by one of our mujahedin [holy warrior] brothers. It was a suicide attack aimed at the police headquarters.”
Kandahar, birthplace of the Taliban movement that rose to control most of Afghanistan by 1996, has seen the worst of a rash of suicide and car-bomb attacks that have claimed dozens of lives in past weeks.
A Canadian diplomat and two other people were killed in a suspected Taliban suicide attack on January 15.
Analysts and some military officials have said the spike in suicide attacks — a tactic previously shunned by the Taliban — shows the increased influence of al-Qaeda, which was sheltered by the militia when it was in power.
About 1 700 people were killed in insurgent-linked violence last year, many of them militants killed by Afghan security forces or by troops from the US-led coalition helping the government hunt down insurgents.
The Taliban — which enforced a radical form of Sunni Islamic law — was toppled by a US-led bombing campaign in late 2001 after it refused to hand over al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden following the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington.
The recent upsurge in violence comes as thousands of Nato troops prepare to take over some duties in southern Afghanistan later this year. — Sapa-AFP