KABUL, 30 August 2004 — At least 17 people including children died in two explosions in Kabul yesterday and at a religious school in a southeastern province of Afghanistan on Saturday night.

The Taleban militia claimed the Kabul bombing, which a spokesman from President Hamid Karzai’s office said killed two US nationals, three Nepalese and two Afghans in front of the offices of an international security company.

Taleban spokesman Abdul Latif Hakimi said the bomb was detonated by a Taleban fighter using a remote control device. “A few minutes ago he phoned our chief... to say that he finished his mission and is alive,” Hakimi said.

The explosion hit the office of Dyncorp Inc., an American firm that provides security for President Karzai and works for the US government in Iraq, said Nick Downie of the Afghanistan NGO Security Office.

Karzai and US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad expressed shock at the attack.

An embassy statement said the contractor was also involved in a project to train Afghan police. “This cowardly attack will not deter US participation in the ongoing effort to help Afghanistan stand on its own feet,” Khalilzad said, expressing sympathy for the victims of the “terrorist attack.”

Downie said he and others at the scene pulled five or six seriously injured people — including other US citizens — from the building. “Some were obviously Dyncorp staff,” he said.

Dyncorp Inc. is a division of Computer Science Services, Inc., based in El Segundo, California. The company is believed to employ Nepalese guards in Afghanistan, where it is also reportedly involved in counter-narcotics efforts.

The blast occurred in Kabul’s Shar-e-Naw district, a bustling area thick with the offices of international organizations and guesthouses used by their staff. The building was burning fiercely after the explosion, which blew out windows of surrounding houses.

Reporters saw the badly mutilated body of one man lying in the street before Afghan police and foreign security guards pushed them back at gunpoint.

Emergency workers ferried the victims to hospital in ambulances and picked body parts from the street.

Residents said a boy living in a neighboring house and a cobbler in a nearby stall were killed, and as many as eight others were wounded. “It was a very, very big explosion, and there were a lot of injured,” said Ahmad Emal, a young shopkeeper watching from behind the police cordon. “These foreigners should leave the residential areas.”

At least nine children and one adult were killed in a separate blast, which ripped through a school in Paktia province on Saturday night, a US military spokeswoman said. “There were four children, five teenagers and one adult killed,” Master Sgt. Ann Bennett said from the US military press center in Kabul.

Bennett said an eight-year-old boy injured in the school explosion was being treated at a US military base, but she was unsure of the total number of the wounded.

“The explosion took place last night inside a private madrasa,” Paktia Governor Haji Assadullah Wafa said.