A suicide bomber slipped his car past a police checkpoint in Kabul and exploded on a busy commercial street Thursday, killing four people in what Afghan officials described as a failed attempt to attack a NATO convoy.
A car used in a suicide attack lies on the road as police investigate the site of an explosion near the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan.
The blast took place about 150 yards from the entrance to a heavily guarded road that leads to the U.S. Embassy, and there was speculation that American officials were the intended target of the bomber, who appeared to prematurely detonate his explosives after crashing into another car, witnesses and officials said.
An interior ministry spokesman, Ezmary Bashary, said four Afghan civilians were killed and nine wounded. The ministry said in a statement that vehicles containing foreign soldiers were the intended target. But the ministry didn't specify if the soldiers were from NATO or the separate U.S. mission in Afghanistan. Witnesses said there were no clearly marked foreign convoys on the road when the Toyota Corolla swerved erratically through traffic, plowed into another car and exploded.
The U.S. Embassy said its staff was safe and that it had no information about any American convoys driving in the area at the time. There was no immediate comment from NATO.
The blast was felt at the U.S. Embassy, where Americans and other Westerners were preparing for a Thanksgiving Day fun run. "I was about 30 or 40 yards inside the gate. There was a large explosion. I felt the shock wave, though it wasn't all that strong,'' said Danny Cutherell, a 26-year-old aid worker from Virginia, according to The Associated Press. "We were about 200 yards from the blast when it went off, but we were behind the embassy wall and that protected us.''
The explosion took place outside the heavily guarded center of Kabul where foreign embassies, government offices and U.S. and NATO bases are located.
The bomber would have had to pass through at least one police checkpoint near where his car exploded, and the blast was a sharp reminder of what many fear is the deteriorating security in Afghanistan's capital.
The Indian embassy was destroyed and 60 people killed in July, one of the few attacks in Kabul this year. There have also been a spate of kidnappings in the city, most of which have been blamed on criminal gangs
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