Peacekeepers warned before deadly Kabul car bomb

Peacekeepers in Afghanistan said yesterday they had received a warning before a suicide car bomber blew up a bus full of German troops in Kabul, killing four soldiers and wounding 31 in the biggest attack on the force to date.

Police said one Afghan civilian was killed in the bombing, which came as the troops headed to the airport to fly home to Germany at the end of their assignment.

Including the unknown driver of the taxi, six people were killed in the attack, which Afghan officials blamed on Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network.

Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Lobbering, spokesman for the 5,000-strong International Security Assistance Force for Kabul (ISAF), told reporters that warnings were received daily, making it hard to know which were real and which were false alarms.

"Although we have warnings, and in this particular case we had that beforehand, that something might happen at a certain time, at a certain place, it is always impossible to predict," he said, referring to Saturday's explosion.

"As far as the threat of car bombs is concerned, these threat warnings have been ongoing now for months and months."

Lobbering said ISAF, currently led jointly by Germany and the Netherlands, had no intention of halting its operations despite the worst attack and first suicide bombing against the force since its deployment after the fall of the Taliban in late 2001.

Lobbering said more attacks on ISAF were expected. "The type of terrorist attacks and the amount of terrorist attacks is in line with what we have been expecting, and what we we still expect, I am sorry to say, for the upcoming future."

The death toll could have been far higher had German peacekeepers not been wearing protective flak jackets in the bus, Lobbering said.