A suicide bomber detonated a device Wednesday near Afghanistan’s foreign ministry in the capital, causing more than 25 causalities, an independent source said.
Images from the scene show people lying in the snow in the street outside the central Kabul building.
“I don’t know how many of them were dead or injured,” AFP driver Jamshed Karimi said, adding: “I saw the man blow himself up.”
Kabul police spokesman Khalid Zadran confirmed the explosion “which unfortunately resulted in casualties.”
“Security teams have reached the area,” he tweeted.
The Taliban claim to have improved security since storming back to power in August 2021 but there have been scores of bomb blasts and attacks, many claimed by the local chapter of DAESH group.The blast hit about 4pm local time (11:30 GMT) on Wednesday, Zadran said.
Taliban foreign and interior ministry officials have yet to comment on the deadly explosion
Obaidullah Baheer, Lecturer at the American University of Afghanistan, Kabul, said that the discrepancies in casualty figures are ‘troubling’.
“We have seen the Taliban do this before. It does not help the security of the city to deny numbers of the actual casualties. So, a lot of questions, little answers,” he told .
Baheer added that the blast site is in a very high security area. “There are multiple checkpoints. You have to have specific documents to access that street,” he said.
The blast reportedly happened when a Chinese delegation was meeting the Taliban at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
“There was supposed to be a Chinese delegation at the foreign ministry today, but we don’t know if they were present at the time of the blast,” deputy minister of information and culture Muhajer Farahi told AFP.
A driver with the AFP team waiting outside the information ministry next door saw a man with a backpack and rifle slung over his shoulder walk past before the man blew himself up.
“He passed by my car and after a few seconds there was a loud blast,” Jamshed Karimi said.
“I saw the man blowing himself up.”
The broken windowpanes of a building are pictured after a suicide blast in Kabul
Some injured people writhed on the ground, screaming for help, and a handful of onlookers scrambled to offer assistance.
The foreign ministry itself did not appear to be badly damaged.
Security situation
The Taliban claims to have improved security since storming back to power in 2021 but there have been dozens of bomb blasts and attacks, many claimed by the local chapter of the ISIL (ISIS) group.
At least five Chinese nationals were wounded last month when armed men stormed a hotel popular with Chinese business people in Kabul.
That raid was claimed by ISIL, who also took responsibility for an attack on Pakistan’s embassy in Kabul in December that Islamabad denounced as an “assassination attempt” against their ambassador.
Four people were killed and 25 wounded in an attack on a mosque on the grounds of the interior ministry in Kabul last October.
And two Russian embassy staff members were killed in a suicide bombing outside their mission in September in another attack claimed by the ISIL-affiliate ISKP (ISIS-K).
Hundreds of people, including members of Afghanistan’s minority communities, have been killed and wounded in other attacks since the Taliban regained power.
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Blast in Kabul