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Kabul, Oct 5 (AFP): A bombing in a mosque on the grounds of Afghanistan’s interior ministry in Kabul killed two people on Wednesday, a hospital said, adding that witnesses saw a man detonate himself in a suicide attack.
\nSince the Taliban returned to power last August they have made security a priority but attacks have ramped up in recent months, with officials trying to downplay them.<\/p>\n
Italian non-governmental organisation Emergency, which operates a hospital in Kabul, said it had received 20 male patients, two “dead on arrival”, following “a bomb attack in a mosque at the interior ministry”.<\/p>\n
“The number of injured people arriving increased and they reported seeing a man detonate a device,” said Emergency country director Dejan Panic.<\/p>\n
“It was a suicide attack,” he added in a statement, quoting patients.<\/p>\n
Interior ministry spokesman Abdul Nafy Takor said the explosion happened “in a mosque which is at a distance from the ministry of interior” where visitors and some employees pray.<\/p>\n
He did not give any official casualty figure or specify the exact distance of the bombing from the ministry, but said an investigation was ongoing.<\/p>\n
On Wednesday afternoon the Emergency hospital was closely guarded by Taliban forces, who were also heavily deployed around the scene of the attack.<\/p>\n
The latest blast comes after a suicide bombing on Friday killed 53 people in a Kabul classroom, including 46 girls and women, according to a UN toll.<\/p>\n
Witnesses said the attacker blew himself up in the women’s section of a gender-segregated classroom at a study hall in the Dasht-e-Barchi neighbourhood — an enclave of the historically oppressed Shiite Hazara community.<\/p>\n
No group has so far claimed responsibility for that attack, which Taliban authorities said claimed 25 lives.<\/p>\n
However, the jihadist group Islamic State, which considers Shiites heretics, has carried out several deadly attacks in the same area targeting girls, schools and mosques.<\/p>\n
The Taliban were also accused of plotting attacks on the Hazara community as they waged a two-decade insurgency against the old US-led regime which collapsed last August.<\/p>\n
The hardline Islamists’ return to power in Afghanistan last year brought an end to that insurgency and a dramatic decline in violence.<\/p>\n
The Taliban movement — made up primarily of ethnic Pashtuns — has pledged to protect minorities and clamp down on security threats.<\/p>\n
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Kabul, Oct 5 (AFP): A bombing in a mosque on the grounds of Afghanistan’s interior ministry in Kabul killed two people on Wednesday, a hospital said, adding that witnesses saw a man detonate himself in a suicide attack. Since the Taliban returned to power last August they have made security a priority but attacks have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-202049","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-world"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202049","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=202049"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202049\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=202049"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=202049"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=202049"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}