Blast kills some 40 people outside Indian Embassy in Kabul

Source: Agencies  |   2008-7-7  |     ONLINE EDITION

A SUICIDE car bomb exploded outside the Indian Embassy in central Kabul today, killing some 40 people in the deadliest attack in Afghanistan's capital this year, officials said.

The massive bomb detonated at the embassy entrance near where dozens of Afghan men line up every morning to apply for visas. The blast knocked down a front wall and damaged two embassy vehicles entering the compound.

The embassy had beefed up security in recent days by installing large, dirt-filled blast walls often used by military forces. But several shops across the street were damaged or destroyed, and smoldering ruins and wounded Afghans covered the street. The explosion rattled much of the Afghan capital.

"Several shopkeepers have died. I have seen shopkeepers under the rubble," said Ghulam Dastagir, a shopkeeper wounded in the blast.

Najib Nikzad, an Interior Ministry spokesman, said the blast killed 40 people. Earlier, Abdullah Fahim, the spokesman for the Ministry of Public Health, said the explosion killed at least 28 people and wounded 141. The Interior Ministry said six police officers were killed, as were three embassy guards.

The explosion, on a busy, tree-lined street near Afghanistan's Interior Ministry, was the deadliest attack in Kabul this year since a suicide bomber attacked an army bus last September, killing 30 people.

President Hamid Karzai condemned the attack and said it was carried out by militants trying to rupture the friendship between Afghanistan and India.

In Delhi, the Indian Ministry of External Affairs said the attack would not deter the mission from "fulfilling our commitments to the government and people of Afghanistan."

Shortly after the attack a woman ran out of a Kabul hospital screaming, crying and hitting her face with both of her hands. Her two children, a girl named Lima and a boy named Mirwais, had been killed.

"Oh my God!" the woman screamed. "They are both dead."