KABUL: A suicide car bomb blew up yesterday outside a US military base in eastern Afghanistan, killing 10 civilian laborers, as the country marked Independence Day under the shadow of extremist attacks.
The blast, claimed by the insurgent Taleban, did not penetrate the base in the town of Khost and security forces were able to prevent a second suicide attack moments later, the US-led coalition and Afghan officials said.
It came amid heightened security as Afghanistan marked Independence Day, commemorating its final defeat of the British Army in 1919.
Kabul was locked down with 7,000 police on patrol and checkpoints at nearly every city center intersection as well as main entry points into the capital.
A spokesman for the Taleban, Zabihullah Mujahed, said his group had carried out the suicide attack in Khost, 30 kilometers from the border with Pakistan.
The US-led coalition said insurgents detonated the device outside the base and that 10 Afghans were killed and 13 wounded. It said earlier that nine had died in the blast at its Salerno camp.
The casualties were laborers who had been waiting to enter the base for work, Khost government spokesman Khaibar Pashtun said.
“Moments later a second car bomber came and wanted to detonate his bombs. Police identified him and opened fire on him,” a secretary to the Khost governor, Mohammad Bilal, told AFP.
He said the attacker was able to escape into the crowd and security forces destroyed the second bomb. “They wanted to disturb Independence Day,” he said.
Reacting to the suicide bombing, President Hamid Karzai said in a statement that by killing “innocent civilians on Independence Day, the terrorists showed their hostility to the freedom of (the) Afghan people.” Later in the day he laid a wreath at the Minar-e-Istiqlal (Column of Independence) in the Defense Ministry grounds in Kabul during a small and tightly secured ceremony.
Karzai has marked Independence Day in previous years with an address at a large public gathering in the city stadium.
His last major public appearance in Kabul, on April 27, was disrupted when militants opened fire on a stage where he, ministers, diplomats and other senior officials were seated for a military parade. Karzai survived but three people as well as three of the attackers — said to be Taleban — were killed.
The Taleban were driven from power in a US-led invasion in late 2001 because they would not hand over their Al-Qaeda allies wanted for the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States.
However, they regrouped, with some of them taking refuge in Pakistan, to launch a snowballing insurgency that military officials say is attracting more Arab, Pakistani and other fighters.
The militia released an Independence Day statement saying Afghanistan was again under the “occupation” of “cruel crusaders” — a reference to the mainly US and British troops helping Afghanistan fight the insurgency. The statement called for Afghans to join jihad, or holy war.
The coalition and separate NATO-led International Security Assistance Force meanwhile issued a rare warning of a “heightened security threat based on credible intelligence reporting.”
