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Suicide bombers target Kandahar police headquarters

Two suicide bombers blew themselves up at the police headquarters in southern Kandahar city, killing and wounding more than 30 police officers and civilians, officials said yesterday.

The bombers detonated their explosives inside the police headquarters yesterday afternoon, provincial police chief Matiullah Khan said. Kandahar city is the capital of the province of the same name.

While Khan said two policemen were killed and 24 policemen and five civilians were wounded, Ahmad Wali Karzai, head of the provincial council in Kandahar and younger of brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, gave different figures for the death toll.

“According to information I received, six policemen and two civilians were killed in the attack and more than 20 others were wounded,” Karzai said.

Earlier, a police officer at the scene of the attack said that six police officers were killed and 15 others wounded.

The police source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the bombers targeted border police commander Abdul Razaq Khan as he was entering the provincial police headquarters.

Razaq was also wounded in the attack, the source said.

Taliban spokesman, Qari Mohammad Yousif Ahmadi, claimed that two of their fighters, Abdul Matin and Qari Mohammad Wali, both residents of the southern region, carried out the attacks.

Ahmadi, who was speaking by telephone from an undisclosed location, said that dozens of policemen were killed and wounded in the blasts.

In another suicide bombing yesterday, a bomber targeted a NATO-led Italian military convoy in Herat Province in western Afghanistan, killing himself but causing no other casualties, Abdul Rauf Ahmadi, a spokesman for the police in the western region said.

Afghan and coalition forces killed at least two dozen Taliban in clashes and airstrikes in eastern and southern regions, officials said yesterday.

Twelve Taliban militants were killed in a US-led coalition airstrike in Khost Province on Saturday, the provincial governor said.
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