Five children killed, presidential adviser wounded in suicide attack

A suicide car bomber killed five children in an attack targeting an Afghan government official in a Taliban flashpoint yesterday in the volatile south.

A senior adviser to President Hamid Karzai was hit by a separate bomb attack in eastern Nangarhar province, leaving him and his travelling companion badly wounded, and also injuring five civilians.

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack in the east. Targeted assassinations are a Taliban trademark in their nine-year insurgency against the Western-backed Afghan government and nearly 150,000 US-led foreign troops.

In southern Kandahar province, a suicide bomber detonated a car bomb prematurely, aiming to hit Dand district governor Ahmadullah Nazick but instead killing five children and wounding one other.

“Five children were killed in the first blast and one child is wounded,” said Kandahar deputy police chief Fazel Mohammad Shairzad.

The car bomb was followed by a roadside bomb attack 10 metres away, after police arrived at the scene, and wounded two policemen, said district criminal investigations chief Mohammad Hussain.

Mr Nazick had been travelling in a convoy along a road in Dand.

An AFP reporter said the dead children were immediately taken away in body bags, leaving the charred body parts of the suicide attacker and small pools of blood at the scene.

Mr Karzai, who has said his government will aim to take full responsibility for security in Afghanistan by the end of 2014, condemned the attack, describing it as the “work of imbeciles”.

In recent months, targeted assassinations have become increasingly common in Kandahar, birthplace of the Taliban movement, and in Dand district alone at least nine members of the council have been killed.

Kandahar is the focus of a US-led troop surge under a counter-insurgency strategy designed to reverse Taliban momentum, secure major population centres and speed up an end to the increasingly deadly and unpopular war.

In eastern Nangarhar, Waheedullah Sabawoon, adviser on tribal affairs to the President, was on a personal visit in Jalalabad, capital of the province, when a bomb placed in a rickshaw exploded and hit his vehicle.

The blast wounded the adviser and a tribal elder travelling with him, along with five civilians near their vehicle, said spokesman Ahmad Zia Abdulzai.

“Sabawoon’s wounds are not critical and he’s in a stable condition in hospital,” said Mr Abdulzai.

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack.

The Kabul-based Mr Sabawoon was once intelligence chief of Hizb-e-Islami, a banned former anti-Soviet mujahedeen faction led by ex-premier Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, which now wages battle against Mr Karzai’s western-backed government.

Elsewhere, insurgents ambushed a key supply route for coalition forces in the central province of Ghazni, killing two Afghan guards escorting a truck along a highway heading for Kandahar, said Ghazni government spokesman Ismail Jahangir.

In London, the Defence Ministry identified two Nato soldiers killed in Helmand on Sunday as British nationals.

One of the soldiers was killed by small arms fire in Lashkar Gah district while the second died when a roadside bomb went off in the Sangin region while he was on a foot patrol.