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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. <\/p>\nA 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. <\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
“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.<\/p>\n
An Afghan and a Western security official said nine foreigners were killed.<\/p>\n
“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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Al Jazeera’s Bernard Smith, reporting from Kabul, said that according to local sources the vehicle “appeared to be carrying foreigners”.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Hezb-i-Islami is Afghanistan’s second-biggest armed group after the Taliban and is led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a former prime minister.<\/p>\n
The attack came a day after protests turned violent for the first time in Afghanistan over\u00a0 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”.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Source: Al Jazeera and agencies<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2260","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-c59-islamic-world"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n