Suicide car bomb in southern Afghanistan leaves at least 29 dead

0 Locals and emergency workers carry the bodies of victims from the scene of the car bombing A huge suicide car bombing outside a bank in Afghanistan’s southern Helmand province has killed at least 29 people, officials said.

Most of the casualties were civilians, said Hayatullah Hayat, the provincial governor in Helmand. The explosion near the Kabul Bank in the provincial capital of Lashkar Gah also wounded at least 60 people, he said.

No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack but Helmand has been at the centre of bitter battles between the Taleban and Afghan security forces, aided by Nato troops.

The insurgents, who are believed to control nearly 80 per cent of the province’s countryside, have increasingly been pushing on to Lashkar Gah and its environs in efforts to take the city.

In recent weeks, the Taleban have overrun Helmand’s key Sangin district, where British and US troops had fought for years to keep them at bay.

The suicide attacker struck as scores of people, many of them Afghan soldiers or civil servants, were waiting near the bank to collect their salaries ahead of the Eid alfitr holiday, which follows the holy month of Ramadan, which is expected to end later this weekend.

Esmatullah, an Afghan border policeman who was at the scene of the explosion, said the noise from the blast was deafening. He said many people were missing amid the chaos, as witnesses and survivors milled around, and ambulance crews struggled to ferry the most seriously wounded to hospital.

“We are taking children to the hospital,” he said.

Hosnia, 12, was found crying outside the bank as she searched for her father, who had brought her to buy shoes ahead of the Muslim holiday.

“I couldn’t find anyone, my brother and my father,” she said. “My father told me he will take me to buy shoes. We came here and then there was the explosion.”

Helmand is considered a key region as it is one of the largest opium-producing provinces for the Taleban, who charge opium traffickers a hefty tax to move their contraband– the raw material used to make heroin – to market.

Meanwhile, police are investigating after an attack the previous night in a mosque in the east of the country killed two members of the local council. Salim Sallhe, spokesman for the provincial governor in eastern Logar, said gunmen opened fire at worshippers during prayers at a mosque in the Baraki district on Wednesday night. Two other local officials were wounded.