KANDAHAR, 2 June 2005 — A suicide bomber killed 20 people, including a police chief, in an attack on a mosque in southern Afghanistan yesterday as mourners gathered to pay respects to an assassinated anti-Taleban cleric.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai condemned the first suicide attack on an Afghan mosque as “an act of non-Muslim and defeated terrorists”. At least 20 people were killed, he said.
The governor of troubled Kandahar province blamed Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda network.
The police chief of the capital Kabul, Gen. Akram Khakreezwal, was among the mourners at the Abdul Rab Akhundzada Mosque in the southern city of Kandahar when the bomber struck.
Witnesses said a man in a police uniform approached the police chief and bent over, pretending to reach for Khakreezwal’s shoes, which he had taken off to enter the mosque in line with tradition.
“That was when he detonated his bomb. It was a terribly big explosion which killed Khakreezwal and his bodyguards and people around him,” survivor Mohammad Afzal, 35, said at the scene.
“I saw bodies scattered, blood all over the place. Dead policemen were also lying there,” said shop owner Kalimullah, who reached the mosque moments after the blast.
It was the most serious in a recent spate of attacks. The bomber wore a police uniform, survivors said. He had walked into the crowded mosque by mingling with Khakreezwal’s security men as they entered with their boss, a native of Kandahar, police said.
Mourners had gathered for the funeral of Maulvi Abdullah Fayyaz, a prominent critic of the Taleban who was killed on Sunday by gunmen on a motorcycle.
There was no claim of responsibility for the blast but Kandahar Governor Gul Agha Shirzai said authorities had got word of several Arab suicide bombers in the area.
“Definitely, it was Al-Qaeda. I can say he was an Arab,” Shirzai told reporters, referring to the bomber. Asked what proof he had, he said the man’s complexion.
Karzai “called on the people to be vigilant to not allow foreigners to conspire against their national security”, his office said in a statement. It did not elaborate.
Interior Minister Ali Ahmad Jalali said the bomber was believed to be a foreigner.
Attacks on mosques in Afghanistan are rare, and until recent years suicide attacks were unheard of.
United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan was shocked and angered by what he called a “senseless attack” and “strongly condemns this heinous act of terrorism”, a spokesman said.
Fayyaz, the head of a government-appointed Islamic scholar’s council, survived a bomb attack at the Abdul Rab Akhundzada Mosque two years ago that was blamed on the Taleban.
The Taleban claimed responsibility for his killing but spokesman Abdul Latif Hakimi ruled out involvement in yesterday’s blast, condemning attacks on places of worship.
“This is not the Taleban’s work,” he said by telephone from an undisclosed location.
In another blast, an Afghan working for an agency clearing land mines was killed and four colleagues wounded when a bomb planted on a bicycle went off as their vehicle passed in neighboring Helmand province, an official there said.
