At least four people, including two attackers, were killed yesterday in the Afghan capital in a suicide car bombing apparently targeting the head of the country's senate, who escaped unharmed, the interior ministry said.
"There was a suicide attack this morning. Four people have died," interior ministry spokesman Yousuf Stanizai said.
The dead included two attackers and two passers-by, one a young girl and the other an old man, Stanizai said.
Sebghatullah Mujadidi, a former Afghan president who is now head of the upper house of parliament, was the apparent target of the attack in Kabul but escaped unharmed, bodyguard Baz Noor who was travelling with him in the same car said.
A pick-up drove near to Mujadidi's car and exploded, damaging the vehicle "but we were -- thanks God -- not hurt," Noor said.
"Our car was damaged but no one was hurt," he said.
Stanizai also said that Mujadidi escaped the attack unharmed.
A news photographer at the scene said that security forces had cordoned off the areas and were carrying out preliminary investigations.
At least two vehicles, one an armored offroad model, could be seen mangled.
Mujadidi also runs a government-initiated reconciliation program aimed at reintegrating fighters from the Taliban regime which was toppled by US-led forces in late 2001.
It was not immediately known who might have been behind the attack, but Afghanistan has seen more than a dozen suicide attacks, most of them in the south, in recent months which have killed nearly 50 people.
The latest in Kabul was on Dec. 16 in which a suicide bomber detonated his explosives-packed car near a Norwegian peacekeeping vehicle close to the national parliament building.
On Jan. 16, 22 people were killed when a suicide attacker riding a motorbike blew himself up near a crowd watching a wrestling match in the town of Spin Boldak in the southern province of Kandahar bordering Pakistan.
Just days earlier, a senior Canadian diplomat was killed in a similar attack in Kandahar which also left two civilians dead.
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