Suicide Car Bomb Blast in Kabul
Source: NYT
Ahmad Massoud/Associated Press
A wounded woman was helped outside the Heetal Hotel in Kabul, Afghanistan, on TuesdayKABUL, Afghanistan — Hedyatullah Rahmani gathered himself from the force of the blast and raced two blocks to the scene of the suicide car bomb that struck central Kabul on Tuesday morning.
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Ahmad Massoud/Associated Press
A victim of the bombing was carried outside the Heetal Hotel in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Tuesday.
He saw two men being burned, trapped inside a car. The driver thrust his hand out the window and was waving it frantically, said Mr. Rahmani, who with two other men pulled the driver from the car.
“We threw him in the ditch of water to kill the fire on his body,” Mr. Rahmani said. But the other passenger, he said, could not be rescued.
The blast killed at least eight people and wounded 40 more, the Afghan authorities said. Four women were among the dead, according to the Interior Ministry.
A spokesman for the Taliban, Zabihullah Mujahid, said in a telephone interview that he did not know whether the bomb was the work of the Taliban.
The explosion occurred just outside a hotel frequented by foreigners and several buildings owned by a former Afghan vice president, Ahmed Zia Massoud, who may have been the target. Mr. Massoud is the brother of the legendary guerrilla leader Ahmad Shah Massoud, who battled Soviet forces during the 1980s and was assassinated by a suicide bomber on Sept. 9, 2001.
The Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, said during a televised speech at a conference on corruption on Tuesday that two of Mr. Massoud’s bodyguards had been killed.
An aide said Mr. Massoud was unharmed, and that he believed the target may actually have been the Heetal Hotel, which is owned by relatives of Burhanuddin Rabbani, a former Afghan president and ex-militant leader.
Bodies of the dead and wounded were carried away by Afghan police officers and citizens who rushed to the scene. The blast shook buildings throughout the upscale neighborhood of Wazir Akbar Khan, home to many embassies and Western aid groups.
It was the deadliest attack in the capital in six weeks, when a Taliban assault on a guest house killed eight people, including five United Nations staff members. It also was the first significant attack in Kabul since President Karzai was sworn into office for a second term last month.
The bombing comes one day after 16 Afghan National Police officers were killed in separate attacks on two police checkpoints, one in northeastern Afghanistan and the other in Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand Province, in the south. The Interior Ministry reported that eight officers were killed in each attack.
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