Suicide bomber targets foreigners in Kabul

A suicide car bomber has killed 12 people, nine of them foreigners, officials said, in an early-morning attack claimed by an armed group which said it struck to avenge an anti-Islam film.

A number of those killed on Tuesday were foreign workers for an international courier company, a senior police source said, and one was an Afghan translator. Eight Afghan workers were injured in the blast.

“At around 6:45 am [0215 GMT] a suicide bomber using a sedan blew himself up along the airport road in District 15. As a result, nine workers of a foreign company and three Afghan civilians are dead, and two police are wounded,” police said in a statement.

An Afghan and a Western security official said nine foreigners were killed.

“There has been a suicide bombing next to a minivan, carrying foreigners. There are a lot of casualties,” Kabul police chief Mohammad Ayoub Salangi told the AFP news agency on Tuesday.

A spokesman for NATO’s US-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) confirmed an explosion near the airport, but said there was no current report of casualties among its personnel.

Al Jazeera’s Bernard Smith, reporting from Kabul, said that according to local sources the vehicle “appeared to be carrying foreigners”.

Armed group Hezb-i-Islami on Tuesday claimed responsibility for the attack, saying it was carried out by a woman to avenge a US-made film deemed insulting to Islam.

The claim was made by spokesman Zubair Sidiqi in a telephone call to AFP from an undisclosed location. It is extremely rare for the faction to claim a suicide attack in Afghanistan. It is also rare for women to carry out suicide attacks.

Hezb-i-Islami is Afghanistan’s second-biggest armed group after the Taliban and is led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a former prime minister.

The attack came a day after protests turned violent for the first time in Afghanistan over  the film Innocence of Muslims, as hundreds of angry men hurled stones at a US military base, clashed with police and shouted “Death to America”.

Witnesses said there was smoke spewing into the sky and a heavy police deployment at the scene of the attack, contributing to a major traffic snarl-up on the busy road.

Source: Al Jazeera and agencies