KABUL • A bomb hidden in an ambulance killed at least 95 people and wounded about 158 in the Afghan capital Kabul yesterday when it blew up at a police checkpoint just days after a deadly attack on one of the most prominent hotels in the city.
The Taleban claimed responsibility for the suicide blast, a week after they claimed the attack on the Intercontinental Hotel in which more than 20 people were killed.
An Interior Ministry spokesman blamed the Haqqani network, a militant group affiliated with the Taleban which Afghan and Western officials consider to be behind many of the biggest attacks on urban targets in Afghanistan.
Hours after the blast, a Health Ministry spokesman said the casualty toll had risen to at least 95 killed and 158 wounded, but was likely to rise as more figures were collated from hospitals.
As medical teams struggled to handle the casualties pouring in, some of the wounded were laid out in the open, with intravenous drips set up next to them in hospital gardens.
"It's a massacre," said Mr Dejan Panic, coordinator in Afghanistan for the Italian aid group Emergency, which runs a trauma hospital in the area.
The latest attack will add pressure on President Ashraf Ghani and his US allies, who have expressed growing confidence that a new, more aggressive military strategy has succeeded in driving Taleban insurgents back from major provincial centres.
SLAUGHTER
I was sitting in the office when the explosion went off... All the windows shattered, the building collapsed and everything came down.
MR ALAM, an office worker whose head was badly cut in the blast.
The United States has stepped up its assistance to Afghan security forces and increased its air strikes against the Taleban and other militant groups, aiming to break a stalemate and force the insurgents to the negotiating table.
However, the Taleban have dismissed suggestions that they have been weakened by the new strategy, and the incidents of the past week have shown the group's capacity to mount deadly, high-profile attacks is undiminished, even in the heavily protected centre of Kabul.
The US-led international force in Afghanistan has vowed its support for the Afghan government and armed forces in their "difficult and dangerous work". It added that none of its members had been killed or wounded in the blast.
Member of Parliament Mirwais Yasini, who was in the area when the blast went off, said an ambulance approached the checkpoint and blew up. The target was apparently an Interior Ministry building nearby.
Buildings hundreds of metres away were shaken by the force of the explosion, which left torn bodies strewn on the street amid piles of rubble and wrecked cars.
Saturday is a working day in Afghanistan and the streets were crowded when the blast went off at around lunchtime in a busy part of the city near a number of foreign embassies and government buildings.
The casualty toll is the worst since 150 people were killed by a truck bomb near the German embassy, not far from the site of yesterday's blast, last May, an attack that prompted a major reinforcement of security in the city.
With much of central Kabul now a heavily fortified zone of high concrete blast walls and police checkpoints, there were angry questions about how the bomber had been able to get through.
"I was sitting in the office when the explosion went off," said Mr Alam, an office worker whose head was badly cut in the blast.
"All the windows shattered, the building collapsed and everything came down."
REUTERS, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
