Sangh Parivar

Kabul (Afghanistan): In a massive explosion Monday
that reverberated around the city, a suicide bomber killed at least 40
people and injured 140 at the gates of the Indian Embassy in the Afghan
capital, the Interior Ministry said.

In New Delhi, the Foreign
Ministry said the military attaché, who held the rank of brigadier, a
senior diplomat and three other Indians were killed in the attack. The
dead also included six Afghan policemen.

While Afghan cities are no stranger to suicide attacks, Monday’s assault ranked among the deadliest in Kabul itself.

The
bomber rammed a car into two Indian diplomatic vehicles as they entered
the gates of the embassy, witnesses reported from the scene. They said
the blast wrecked several other cars and spread human body parts and
bloodstained scraps of clothing amid the debris.

The embassy is near the Afghan Interior Ministry, the scene of a huge blast last year.

The
bombing followed an attack on police officers in Islamabad, the capital
of neighboring Pakistan, on Sunday and an earlier assault on a
diplomatic mission in which a suicide bomber attacked the Danish
Embassy in Islamabad last month.

On April 27, President Hamid Karzai came under fire shortly before an annual military parade.

There
was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack. The Taliban
has threatened to escalate a campaign of suicide bombings in an attempt
to topple the government and challenge the presence of some 60,000
foreign troops in Afghanistan, including 34,000 Americans.

The U.S.-led forces are battling a resurgent Taliban that has stepped up attacks recently.

The
death toll among foreign troops in June was the highest since the
American-led invasion that toppled the Taliban in late 2001. The latest
death among the foreign forces came on Monday when a Canadian soldier
was killed, Agence France-Press reported.

The violence in
Afghanistan has surged at the same time as deaths in Iraq have fallen.
Among the American-led forces in the two countries, 46 service members
were killed in Afghanistan in June, compared with 31 in Iraq, the
second straight month in which combat deaths in Afghanistan exceeded
those in Iraq.

Witnesses said the blast on Monday left two
Indian Embassy vehicles wrecked, but the Afghan authorities, quoted by
The Associated Press, said the Indian ambassador was not at the mission
when the bomber attacked.The blast seemed to have torn through
passers-by close to a nearby market area and people queuing for visas
at the embassy. The dead included women and three children, Afghan
officials said.

Haji Khial Mohammad, 45, who was in line to
apply for an Indian visa, said a “vehicle came and hit the embassy
gate. I was shocked and could not hear anything after the attack. But I
saw at least 10 men and three women in the queue who were probably
killed.”

Mohammad Ajmal, 26 a shopkeeper in the market adjacent
to the embassy said, “After a very loud explosion, I could barely could
stand up” after goods from his shelves spilled over him.

Reuters
reported that U.S. troops were among the security forces who arrived
after the blast and cordoned off the area. India is seen as an ally of
the Afghan government and is financing major development projects.

The
bombing on Monday brought the death toll among Afghans to more than 50
in recent days. Local officials in the east of the country said Sunday
that an American airstrike killed at least 27 civilians at a wedding
party, most of them women and children and including the bride.

Officials
of the American-led coalition disputed the report, saying that the
airstrike killed militants and that there was no evidence of women and
children at the scene.

The attack early Sunday in the Deh Bala district of Nangarhar Province was the second in which civilian deaths were reported.

President
Karza, has ordered an investigation into a helicopter strike on Friday
in Nuristan Province in which the provincial governor said 22 civilians
had been killed.

The American military has also disputed that account, saying that only people who had been firing on coalition forces were hit.

The
suicide bombing on Monday was among the bloodiest in Afghanistan since
February, 2008, when a bomber blew himself up in a large crowd gathered
at a dogfighting event just outside Kandahar in southern Afghanistan.
That attack killed about 80 people and wounded more than 90 in the
country’s worst single bombing since 2001.

Source: www.nytimes.com