At least 11 people have been killed and 13 wounded in a suicide attack at the home of a prominent politician in the increasingly volatile eastern city of Jalalabad, an Afghan official said yesterday.
The attacker detonated his explosives, which were secreted in his clothing, about 10:30am at the residential compound of Obaidullah Shinwari, Nangarhar provincial government spokesman Ataullah Khyogani said.
Shinwari is a member of Nangarhar’s provincial government and his family is active in local and national politics.
Photo: Reuters
Khyogani said a guesthouse on the compound was crowded with people who had been invited to a family event.
“The number of casualties is likely to increase because there were so many people there,” Khyogani said.
Nangarhar Public Health Hospital spokesman Enamullah Miakheil said that 13 dead bodies and 14 wounded people had been brought to the hospital so far.
Photo: Reuters
The compound is close to the Pakistani consulate, which was targeted last week in an attack claimed by the Islamic State (IS) group.
No group has yet claimed responsibility for yesterday’s attack, but a Taliban spokesman posted a message on Twitter denying Taliban involvement.
Jalalabad, the capital of Nangarhar Province, has seen the number of threats and attacks rise in recent months as the presence of IS has grown in the region. Militants affiliated with IS have fought fierce battles with the Taliban, with IS taking control of at least four districts on the province’s border with Pakistan.
The attack comes one day ahead of a second round of high-level talks aimed at eventually brokering a peace deal between Kabul and the Taliban, who have been fighting for more than 14 years.
The talks are to see representatives of Afghanistan, Pakistan, the US and China meet to formulate a roadmap for a dialogue that would eventually, they hope, include Taliban representatives.
The first meeting of the group took place in the Pakistani capital Islamabad on Jan. 11. The Taliban has not been included in these meetings.
The meetings seek to revive a process that was derailed in July last year after the first and only face-to-face meeting between the Afghan government and Taliban representatives in Islamabad. That initiative faltered when Kabul announced that the insurgent group’s leader had secretly been dead for more than two years.
Subsequent meetings were canceled and relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan chilled, as Afghan President Ashraf Ghani publicly blamed Pakistan for using the Taliban to wage war on his country.
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