Afghan bombing claims dozens of workers lined up to get paid

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — A Taliban car bombing killed at least 34 people and wounded 60 others as they lined up at a bank to collect their pay on Thursday in Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand province, in southern Afghanistan, according to Afghan officials.

The attacker drove into a crowd in front of a branch of the New Kabul Bank in the city, detonating a car bomb so potent that some victims were blown into the nearby Helmand River, officials said.

The governor of Helmand, Hayatullah Hayat, said that civilians and soldiers were among the dead and wounded, including children. “Most of the victims were civilians, but some were military, and we are investigating why military men came to a bank in the city, since they should collect their pay from bank branches on their bases,” Hayat said.

Many victims were hard to identify because the bodies were so badly mutilated, said Mualadad Tobagar, the head of the Boost Hospital, where most of the victims were taken.

The victims were all gathering to collect their wages on the last workday before the end of Ramadan and the beginning of the Eid al-Fitr holiday.

A spokesman for the Taliban, Qari Yousuf Ahmadi, said in a WhatsApp message to journalists that the insurgents had carried out the attack but that all the victims were soldiers and police officers, some of them in civilian clothing. He said civilians had been barred from the bank at the time of the attack, but he did not address the reports of women and children being among the victims.