A suicide bomber blew himself up in a crowd of people on Thursday in the capital of southern Uruzgan Province, killing as many as 10 people, including two children, as the US ambassador was meeting with local officials, Afghan officials said.
Up to 50 civilians and police officers were wounded in the blast in Tirin Kot. The ambassador, Ronald Neumann, was not hurt, nor were any of the people traveling with him, said Lou Fintor, a spokesman for the US embassy.
"The ambassador and his party are safe and have been accounted for," he said.
The ambassador was visiting US troops, part of a provincial reconstruction team based in the city and was meeting with local officials when the bomb went off.
"The attack does not seem to have been directed at me," Neumann said in a comment provided by his spokesman.
A Taliban spokesman, Muhammad Yousuf Ahmadi, claimed responsibility for the explosion, naming the bomber and saying that the attack was intended to disrupt the visit by the Americans.
"We knew that there were American officials coming to this gathering but we did not know the US ambassador was attending," he said.
The spokesman, reached by telephone, claimed that 15 Afghan and US soldiers were among the casualties. That claim was denied by Afghan officials.
The deputy provincial governor, Hajji Abdul Aziz, said the explosion occurred more than half a mile from the governor's office, where local officials and tribal elders were gathered to meet the ambassador.
Aziz said the explosion killed civilians in a market, which was busy with shoppers. The provincial security chief, Hajji Ali Ahmad, was among those wounded.
Fifteen people were seriously wounded and were taken for medical treatment to the southern city of Kandahar, he said. He said the ambassador left the town 20 minutes after the explosion.
A spokesman for the Interior Ministry in Kabul put the casualties slightly lower than the provincial officials, saying that eight people had been killed and 35 wounded.
He said the bomber blew himself up in a crowd of people watching a dog fight.
Incidents of suicide bombings have increased in the last six months in Afghanistan.
Afghans had not usually used this tactic, but there have been about 20 suicide attacks in Afghanistan, most of them in the last few months.
Lone bombers have driven cars loaded with explosives at US and NATO military convoys, and individuals with explosives strapped to their bodies have thrown themselves at vehicles.
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the