KABUL, 15 November 2005 — Two apparent suicide car bombers targeted NATO peacekeepers in Afghanistan’s capital yesterday, killing a German soldier and three Afghans and wounding other troops and civilians, officials said. Two bombers also died.
The attacks happened around 90 minutes and a few hundred meters apart on the road from Kabul to the eastern city of Jalalabad, near the offices of the agency which oversaw key parliamentary elections in September.
In a third incident, troops from the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force opened fire on a station wagon as it sped toward the scene of one of the earlier blasts, wounding one of the occupants.
“A civilian and one German soldier from ISAF were killed in the first explosion, and one woman and one child in the second one,” Interior Ministry spokesman Yousuf Stanizai told AFP. A man identifying himself as a spokesman for the Taleban militia said it had carried out the bombings. “We claim responsibility for the attacks in Kabul today. The attacks were carried out by our mujahedeen (holy warrior) brothers,” the spokesman, who gives his name as Dr. Hanif, told AFP.
“There might soon be a third one as well. We had three attacks planned in that area today. All the attacks were carried out by Afghans.”
In the first attack a “suicide bomber” rammed his Toyota Corolla into a German vehicle working with the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force on Jalalabad Road, Stanizai said.
German Defense Minister Peter Struck confirmed that one German soldier was killed, a second seriously wounded and a third less badly hurt. The troops were in an armored vehicle that failed to withstand the powerful blast, he said.
Just over one hour later a taxi cab apparently rigged up as a bomb plowed into another ISAF convoy, Ghulam Rasoul, director of the Kabul Police Quick Reaction Force, told AFP. In addition to the woman and child who died in the second attack two ISAF soldiers and two Afghan soldiers were wounded and evacuated for treatment, Rasoul said.
The partially dismembered body of a man, possibly the bomber, lay at the site and two cars were badly damaged, an AFP correspondent said. Some nearby shops were on fire, the correspondent added.
Shortly after the second blast peacekeepers cordoning off the scene shot at another Toyota car when it refused to stop, Stanizai said, without commenting on whether it was the third attack mentioned by the Taleban spokesman.
“ISAF opened fire and as a result one of the two or three people in the car was wounded. Earlier reports I have indicate that after they searched the vehicle they did not find any explosives,” the spokesman added.
A spate of suicide bombings in past weeks have been blamed on the Taleban regime, which tried and failed to disrupt the Sept. 18 parliamentary elections.
The deadliest was on Sept. 28 when a suicide attacker in military uniform drove a motorcycle into a bus outside an army base in Kabul, also on the Jalalabad Road, killing eight soldiers and a civilian.
In June 2003, four German soldiers died and 11 were wounded in a suicide attack on an ISAF convoy. ISAF has been in Afghanistan since late 2001 and came under NATO control in 2003.
