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Latest Afghan blast kills 35
18/02/2008 16:08 - (SA)
Kandahar - A Taliban suicide car bomb aimed at Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan killed 35 civilians on Monday, a day after another suicide blast left more than 100 dead in the country's deadliest such attack.
The NATO-led International Security Assistance Force said three of its soldiers were also wounded in the powerful suicide blast on Monday in Spin Boldak, a busy market town near the Pakistan border.
"The suicide attacker detonated near a Canadian military convoy. In the attack 35 civilians were killed, 27 civilians were wounded and also three Canadian troops were wounded," Khalid told AFP.
A spokesperson for the extremist Taliban movement said his group had carried out the blast, which is similar to scores carried out by extremists who were in government between 1996 and 2001.
The attack came a day after a suicide bomber blew himself up in a crowd of hundreds of men and boys watching a dog fighting competition outside Kandahar city, killing more than 100 people.
It was the deadliest suicide blast since the fall of the Taliban regime in a US-led invasion. Khalid said on Monday the target of Sunday's blast was an anti-Taliban militia commander, Abdul Hakim Jan, who had been at the dog fight.
The commander had been warned that his life was under threat from the Taliban, the governor told hundreds of people packed into a mosque for a ceremony to mourn Jan.
"We told him a week ago that a suicide bomber was looking for him. He said 'I cannot hide, what should I do?'" he said.
Afghan officials blamed the extremist Taliban for the attack. But a spokesperson for the movement, Yousuf Ahmadi, rejected Taliban involvement, suggesting the motive was infighting among pro-government commanders.
"The attack west of Kandahar in a dog-fighting ground is not our work," Ahmadi told AFP by telephone Monday. "We do not claim responsibility for it."
Sunday's bombing was condemned by the United Nations and several Western countries which have a military presence in the war-ravaged country.
The UN Security Council underlined in a statement "the need to bring perpetrators, organisers, financiers and sponsors of this reprehensible act of terrorism to justice."
It reiterated that "no terrorist act can reverse the path toward peace, democracy and reconstruction in Afghanistan."
The British Ministry of Defence announced on Monday that one of its soldiers was killed on Sunday in another explosion in the southern province of Helmand.
The soldier was killed and another wounded when they were caught in a blast while on foot patrol in Helmand province's Kajaki area, the Ministry of Defence said in a statement its website.
The new casualty took to 16 the number of international soldiers killed in Afghanistan this year.
There are around 43 000 soldiers in the 40-nation force which is deployed to Afghanistan under a UN mandate.
- AFP
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