Two gunmen killed after Kabul siege
KABUL — Two gunman who attacked an intelligence service compound on Thursday in the city’s northwest have been killed, with police saying the nearly six-hour siege is over.
Kabul police chief spokesman Hekmat Stanikzai said police finally took control of the partially constructed building where the gunmen had holed up in and from where they were opening fire at the nearby intel compound.
A private university located nearby was put on lockdown but there were no injuries among the students during the shootout.
Police officers went floor by floor through to building to make sure no attackers remained there. No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack.
The firefight erupted near a training facility overseen by the National Security Directorate — Afghanistan’s intelligence agency — with the gunmen holed up in a construction site near residential homes, an official at the scene said.
A live feed on local broadcaster Tolonews showed the area cordoned off with gunfire echoing through the empty streets.
The attack came just hours after a suicide bomber detonated explosives killing at least 34 students inside an education center in western Kabul, where students were studying for college entrance exams.
The attack came as the city’s residents held funeral services for the victims of the suicide bombing.
The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the suicide blast on Thursday.
Most of the victims were young men and women, high school graduates preparing for university entrance exams in the educational center when the bomber walked into the building and blew himself up.
Overwhelmed hospitals
The city’s hospitals were overwhelmed in the immediate aftermath of the bombing as officials collected data on the casualties, leading to the confusion and the wrong toll.
The Dasht-e-Barchi area is populated by members of Afghanistan’s minority ethnic Hazaras, a Shiite community that has in the past been targeted by similar large-scale attacks such as the Wednesday bombing, which also wounded 56 people, according to Health Ministry spokesman Wahid Majroh.
The school bombing underscored the price that ordinary Afghans have paid in the grinding conflict as the country reels from a recent uptick in violence, including a massive, dayslong Taliban onslaught on the eastern city of Ghazni.
In the past two years, there have been at least 13 attacks on the Shiite community in Kabul alone.
Fifteen of the victims’ bodies were taken on Thursday to a Hazara community compound in Kabul where a mass funeral service was being held. The remaining victims will be taken to their villages to be buried there, said Gulam Hassan, the cousin of one of the victims.