Bombings in Kabul Kill 2, including Cleric
Afghan President Ashraf Ghani denounced the cleric’s death as a “terrorist attack on the dignity and bright future of Afghanistan”. No one immediately claimed responsibility for the Kabul attacks, which also wounded five people.
The first bomb was attached to a military vehicle in central Kabul and wounded two military personnel, said Ferdaws Faramarz, spokesman for the Kabul police chief, AP reported.
An hour later, the second bomb, in the northern part of the city, killed two people, including cleric Mohammad Atef, and wounded two others. A third sticky bomb wounded one person in western Kabul. Faramarz said police are investigating.
Ghani, in a statement released by the Presidential Palace, also said that Atef’s killing was the latest in a series of targeted crimes and assassinations. Atef headed the central council of Jamiat-e-Eslah of Afghanistan.
Abdullah Abdullah, the chairman of the country’s High Council for National Reconciliation, also condemned Atef’s killing.
“Atef was a supporter of peace and reconciliation in the country,” he said in a statement. “But unfortunately, the enemies of the Afghan people took him away from us.”
The Taliban also condemned the cleric’s death, blaming the Afghan intelligence agency without offering any evidence to the claim. Taliban spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, said the insurgents learned of Atef’s killing “with great sadness" — an apparent denial they had played a role in the bombing.
In recent months, the Daesh terrorist group has claimed responsibility for multiple attacks in Kabul, including on schools and educational institutions that killed 50 people, most of them students.
On Monday, a report by a US government watchdog — the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, known as SIGAR — said that Taliban attacks in the Afghan capital of Kabul are also on the rise, with increasing targeted killings of government officials, civil-society leaders and journalists.
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