Terrorists strike Kabul and Lahore DUBAI Gulf News Report T FROM THE COVER — A3
TALIBAN BOMBERS KILL 35 IN AFGHAN CAPITAL, 26 IN PAKISTANI CITY
aliban suicide attackers struck yesterday in Afghanistan capital Kabul and the Pakistani city of Lahore, killing more than 60 people.
In Kabul, a Taliban suicide attacker detonated a car bomb in the western part of the city, killing up to 35 people and wounding more than 40, government officials said, in one of the worst attacks in the Afghan capital in recent weeks.
Police cordoned off the area, located near the house of the deputy government chief executive Mohammad Mohaqiq.
The suicide bombing, which targeted government personnel, continued the unrelenting violence that has killed more than 1,700 civilians in Afghanistan so far this year.
In Lahore, a bomber killed at least 26 people, many of them policemen, officials said, in an attack which shattered a period of relative calm in Pakistan’s second-largest city.
Punjab government spokesperson Malik Mohammad Ahmad said the attack had occurred at an old vegetable market in the Kot Lakhpat neighbourhood in Lahore.
The area is a busy locality and the office of the Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif is located nearby.
The attack wrought carnage near the Lahore Technology Park in the centre of the city. Police deployed to clear street vendors from the area had been targeted, a police official said.
“We suspect that he [the suicide bomber] came on a motorcycle and he rammed it into a police checkpoint,” Lahore police operations chief Haider Ashraf told Reuters. “The death toll we have now is 26 dead and 52 are wounded,” said Jam Sajjad Hussain, spokesman for the Rescue 1122 service.
A Taliban bombing early yesterday morning that killed dozens of people in Kabul has renewed concerns that Afghanistan’s notoriously ungovernable provinces could become a new staging ground for attacks on the West despite months of unremitting warfare.
The attack yesterday, in which a Taliban suicide attacker detonated a car bomb in the western part of Kabul, killed at least 35 people and wounded more than 40, government officials said.
Police cordoned off the area, located near the house of the deputy government chief executive Mohammad Mohaqiq, in a part of the city where many of the mainly Hazara community live. It was one of the worst attacks in the Afghan capital in recent weeks, continuing the unrelenting violence that has killed more than 1,700 civilians in Afghanistan so far this year.
Wave of attacks
The Taliban, which is battling the Western-backed Afghan government and a Nato-led coalition for control of Afghanistan, has launched a wave of attacks around the country in recent days, sparking fighting in more than half a dozen provinces.
A Taliban spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, said that they were behind the explosion and that they had targeted buses belonging to the National Directorate of Security. Afghan security officials, however, cast doubt on the Taliban’s claim of who they were targeting. A senior official said that the intelligence service does not use buses to transport its staff and that most of the victims were civilian workers of the ministry of mines.
“I was in my shop when suddenly I heard a terrible sound and as a result all of my shop windows shattered,” said Ali Ahmad, a resident in the area of yesterday’s blast. The police kept the area cordoned off hours after the attack as firefighters cleaned up blood and the remains of the victims. The windows of most of the buildings in the area were blown out.
The Afghan interior ministry called the attack “a criminal act against humanity” and warned that casualty toll could rise further. Afghan President Ashraf Gani condemned the bombing. “Once again, these terrorists are attacking civilians and targeting government staff,” Gani said.
Security forces have been on high alert in recent days ahead of what was supposed to be a major protest against the government in the west of the city, marking the anniversary of a bombing claimed by Daesh that targeted a peaceful demonstration last year and that killed at least 80 people. But the protest was called off at the last minute on Sunday, reportedly for security reasons, and the protest leaders have said they will try to talk to the government first. Kabul has accounted for at least 20 per cent of all civilian casualties this year, including at least 150 people killed in a massive truck bomb attack at the end of May, according to United Nations figures.
Daesh claimed an attack on a mosque in the capital two weeks ago that killed at least four people. On Sunday, dozens of Afghan troops were under siege after Taliban fighters overran a district in northern Faryab province, a spokesman for the provincial police said. There was also fighting in Baghlan, Badakhshan, and Kunduz provinces in Afghanistan’s north, and Kandahar, Helmand, and Uruzgan in the south, according to officials.
The resurgence of violence also coincides with the US administration weighing up its strategic options for Afghanistan, including the possibility of sending more troops to bolster the NATO-led training and advisory mission already helping Afghan forces battle the Taliban as well as a resurgent Daesh.
I was in my shop when suddenly I heard a terrible sound and as a result all of my shop windows shattered.” Ali Ahmad | Resident of the area