Blast kills five policemen: Afghan MP survives attack
KABUL, Dec 22: An anti-Taliban legislator survived a suicide car bomb attack in Afghanistan's capital on Friday while five policemen died in a roadside bomb blast in the south of the country, officials said.
The suicide attack which killed one civilian and injured seven other people was the first in heavily guarded Kabul since October.
The bomber rammed an explosives-laden vehicle into a car belonging to MP Padshah Khan Zadran as it left his house in eastern Kabul, police criminal investigation chief Ali Shah Paktiawal said.
“Fortunately Zadran was not in the vehicle,” Paktiawal said.
The interior ministry said three bodyguards and five civilians were wounded, one of whom died on the way to hospital. All of the injured were in critical condition, police said.
Blood and parts of the attacker's body were strewn across the road, and the parliamentarian's car was badly damaged, a photographer at the scene of the blast said.
Zadran, the leader of an ethnic Pashtun tribe and a former anti-Soviet fighter, is an MP for southeastern Paktia province. He has often criticised the Taliban and has accused Pakistan of aiding them.
Police said that in mid-December they arrested an Afghan national named Rasoul Khan Sartak on charges of planning to assassinate Zadran. The suspect is currently in police custody.
Separately on Friday a remote-controlled bomb planted near a road near Tirinkot, the capital of troubled southern Uruzgan province, ripped through a police patrol vehicle, police said.
Five police were killed in the blast near Tirinkot, said provincial spokesman Abdul Qayoom Qayoomi.
The interior ministry blamed the Kabul attack on “enemies of Afghanistan”. A spokesman for the ultra-Islamic militia claimed responsibility for the Uruzgan blast.
Violence linked to a Taliban-led insurgency has left nearly 4,000 people dead this year, most of them militants.
Four Afghan civilians and three policemen were killed on Thursday by two separate roadside bombs aimed at police convoys.
The governor of Paktia province, Hakim Taniwal, was assassinated in a suicide bombing in September, becoming the first governor to be killed since the Taliban were toppled.
On Dec 12 a suicide bomber blew himself up at a governor's house in southern Helmand province, killing eight people. The governor, Mohammad Daud, survived.
In another incident on Friday, suspected militants in a car killed a tribal policeman and injured two others in a drive-by shooting in the tribal area of North Waziristan which borders east Afghanistan, officials said.—AFP
