Two suicide car bombs ripped into security vehicles in Kabul on Thursday, killing two foreigners and two Afghans, officials said, also reporting that the Taliban had beheaded three policemen. The bomber exploded his car near the vehicle of a private security company involved in mentoring the Afghan police, Afghan security officials said. “Two Americans are dead and five Afghan civilians are wounded,” city’s criminal investigation chief Alishah Paktiawal said.The force of the blast ripped off one side of an armoured Land Cruiser. Pieces of flesh, apparently from the attacker, were strewn up to 80 metres from the destroyed car and charred chunks of plastic and metal littered the ground. The Taliban claimed responsibility.
The last suicide bombing in the capital was on June 17, when a massive attack rocked the heart of the city killing 35 people in the deadliest blast in the insurgency launched after the Taliban was driven from government in 2001.
The second suicide bomb on Thursday struck a vehicle of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force in a remote area of the eastern province of Paktika, ISAF and an eyewitness said. “It was a car bomb,” ISAF spokesman Major John Thomas said. “We have got ISAF casualties and local casualties ... from what we know now they are all injuries,” he said. A witness, Mohammad Shah, said the attacker had driven an explosive-filled car into an ISAF vehicle near a hospital being built with help from the foreign forces. “I saw eight civilians wounded and one 18-year-old civilian is killed,” he said. Moreover, the governor of the western province of Farah said Taliban militants had beheaded three off-duty Afghan policemen. The three were returning to work on Tuesday after holidays and the bus they were travelling in was stopped by armed militants, Governor Muhaidin Baluch said. “The three were beheaded by Taliban,” he added.
ISAF reported meanwhile that it had killed “several extremists” in a battle in the southern province of Uruzgan on Wednesday.