A suicide bomber blew himself up in a crowded area of the Afghan capital on Saturday, killing at least 12 people and wounding scores in the latest in a series of such attacks on Kabul.
It was not immediately clear who carried out the morning rush-hour attack, but similar strikes have been claimed by the extremist Taliban movement waging a deadly insurgency that has included regular suicide blasts.
The attack came as President Hamid Karzai prepared to address the media on his trip to the United States, which was marked by a row with the leader of neighbouring Pakistan about the reasons for the rise in the insurgency.
Police said the attacker detonated explosives strapped to his body at about 8am local time in a crowd of Ministry of Interior (MOI) staff who had gathered at the compound’s personnel gate to get to work.
“It was a suicide blast,” the city’s criminal investigation department chief, Alishah Paktiawal, told Agence France-Presse (AFP).
“As a result 12 people are dead and 42 persons are injured,” interior ministry spokesperson Zemarai Bashary told AFP. Ten of the dead were civilians and the other two were police officers, he said.
A public health ministry official said earlier the bodies of 10 people killed in the blast were in two of the city’s hospitals. Nearly 50 were wounded, Salam Jalali said.
A ministry of interior official who did not want to be identified said he had personally pulled the bodies of three shopkeepers from shops destroyed in the blast.
A police officer reported seeing the bodies of four of his colleagues.
The site was immediately sealed off by Afghan and Nato-led security forces that patrol the city.
There have been several suicide blasts in the heavily secured capital this year. One of the deadliest was a powerful car bomb on September 8 that killed two United States soldiers and 14 civilians.
An improvised explosive device south of the city killed an Italian soldier and a child on Tuesday.
The extremist Taliban movement did not immediately comment about Saturday’s blast. — AFP