By Matthew Rosenberg and Jawad
Sukhanyar
Three blasts on Sunday morning
punctured months of relative calm in Kabul, with the Taliban carrying out at
least two attacks, including a suicide bombing inside the city’s heavily
fortified police headquarters that reportedly targeted senior officials there.
The toll from the attacks,
which took place over the course of a few hours, appeared limited, with Afghan
officials saying the sole person killed was a senior police official, and that
at least seven people had been wounded. But officials said they were still
assessing the situation and that the number of dead or wounded could rise.
Yet even if the casualty count
remains low, the attacks once again served notice to Afghan and Western
officials that the Taliban’s bombers could infiltrate even the most
well-guarded parts of a city where Afghanistan’s security forces and the
American-led coalition have poured tremendous resources into thwarting
insurgent plots.
The bombing at the police
headquarters that reverberated through the city around 9 a.m. was the most
brazen of Sunday’s attacks. Ebadullah Karimi, a spokesman for the police in
Kabul, said a suicide bomber had detonated his explosives inside the headquarters
building.
Mr. Karimi offered no
additional details before rushing off the phone, saying that he was at the
hospital aiding people wounded in the attack.
But a police official said that
a man in a police uniform had made his way past numerous checkpoints where he
was supposed to have been searched, and appeared outside the office of the
city’s police chief, Gen. Zahir Zahir.
Whether the man was a police
officer or an impostor was unclear. But when he asked to see General Zahir, he
was sent into the office of the general’s chief of staff, Col. Mohammad Yassin.
Once inside, the bomber detonated his explosives, said the official, who spoke
on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to
reporters.
Colonel Yassin was killed along
with the bomber, and four other people in the room at the time were wounded,
the official said. He added that the authorities had already begun
investigating how the bomber managed to get past security and into the heart of
the police headquarters complex without anyone discovering his explosives.
A few hours earlier, about an
hour after dawn, a hidden bomb believed to have been planted by insurgents
detonated near a bus carrying soldiers, said Mohammad Zahir Azimi, a spokesman
for the Ministry of Defense.
He said there were no army
casualties, though it was unclear if civilians had been killed or wounded, as
is often the case when hidden bombs are detonated in crowded areas. Dr.
Noor-ul-Haq Yousafzai, who works at Indira Gandhi Children’s Hospital in Kabul,
said a 10-year-old boy admitted on Sunday appeared to have been wounded in the
attack on the bus.
Later in the morning, just over
an hour after the blast at the police headquarters, a third explosion could be
heard in Kabul, but where it took place and whether it was another bomb
remained unclear.
Before the third blast,
Zabiullah Mujahid, a Taliban spokesman, said the insurgents were behind the
attacks on the army bus and the police headquarters. Mr. Mujahid said the
attack on police headquarters was carried out by a man named Maulvi Yahya
Badakhshani.
He added that there were
foreign advisers present at the time of the bombing, and that they, too, had
sustained casualties. But the American-led coalition said it had no reports
that any of its people were there when the bombing took place.
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