A LONE Taliban suicide bomber blew himself up inside a busy Kabul supermarket popular with foreign diplomats yesterday, killing nine people and wounding several others.
The brazen and highly unusual attack on a largely civilian target was timed for mid-afternoon during the Afghan weekend, when the upmarket Finest store was full of customers and staff.
Kabul’s police chief, Mohammad Ayub Salangi, said three foreign women and one child were among the dead, while six others were wounded. He did not give details of the nationalities involved, but at least one American had to be treated for shrapnel wounds.
Store workers said expatriates from China and the Philippines had been near the site of the explosion.
One Finest employee, who had been packing goods for shoppers at the time and did not give his name, said the attacker threw two grenades before detonating his main charge.
“I thought two glass bottles had fallen on the floor, but then I saw they were grenades and I ran straight out of the front door on to the street,” he said. “A few seconds later was the big explosion.”
Other people say they heard shooting moments before the blasts.
The explosion left shards of glass strewn across the road in front of the building, which is opposite the British embassy compound. Inside, the usually brightly lit interior of a shop that strove to be the most modern in Kabul was a blackened mess of charred packets and tins of food and other high-end imported goods.
Agents of the National Directorate of Security scoured the scene. President Hamid Karzai, condemned the attack saying the “enemies of Afghanistan are so desperate that they are now killing civilians, including women, inside a food market”.
The Taliban’s spokesman, in a text message to media organisations shortly after the explosion, admitted responsibility for the attack, saying the target was the “head of the Blackwater company in Afghanistan”.
Blackwater is a private US security company that gained notoriety for its activities in Iraq and Afghanistan. There has been no confirmation that any employees of the company, now called Xe Services, were in the store at the time. – ( Guardianservice)