Taliban attack on police cadets kills at least 27 in Afghanistan

KABUL, Afghanistan — Taliban insurgents bombed a convoy of buses carrying police cadets on the outskirts of Kabul, the Afghan capital, on Thursday, killing at least 27 people, including four civilians, government officials said.

The death toll was almost certain to rise, officials said, and ambulances could be heard racing to a major trauma hospital in central Kabul a few hours after the explosions.

A Taliban spokesman, writing on a Twitter account associated with the group, said the bombings had killed 150 people, but there was no immediate corroboration of that assertion by government officials.

During a year of surging violence across Afghanistan, the government and its foreign allies have failed to coax the Taliban into peace talks, or even into agreeing on a cease-fire that would have lasted during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which will end next week.

The bombings were the second largescale assault by the Taliban in Kabul in less than two weeks. On June 20, a suicide bomber detonated his explosives next to a minibus shuttling Nepalese and Indian security guards to work at the Canadian Embassy, in one of the deadliest attacks on foreign contractors in the capital.

On Thursday, the insurgents appeared to have employed a familiar attack strategy intended to maximize casualties, as well as demonstrate the reach of the Taliban even in well-secured cities like the capital.

The convoy, which carried 215 cadets in five buses, was first hit by a car bomb that destroyed two of the buses, according to Mohamed Musa Rahmati, the governor of the district where the attack occurred. A short while later, the convoy was hit by a second explosion, although the source of that blast was unclear, the Interior Ministry said.

The cadets had recently graduated from a police academy and were traveling to Kabul for their first assignments, Rahmati said.