A suicide attack in front of a mosque in southwestern Afghanistan killed 24 people and wounded more than 30 others, a provincial governor said yesterday.
The attack took place on Thursday as men were getting ready for the evening prayer at the central mosque in Zaranj, the capital of Nimroz Province, Governor Ghulam Dastagir Azad said.
Azad said there may have been more than one bomber.
“I’m not sure if it was single attack or a double attack,” he said, noting that a district police chief and border reserve police commander were among the dead.
Most of those killed and wounded were civilians, including children and old men, Azad said.
Meanwhile, the son of the new head of the Dutch military and another Dutch soldier serving with NATO-led forces in Afghanistan were killed yesterday when their vehicle hit an improvised explosive device.
The Dutch Defense Ministry said in a statement there were no indications that the attack was specifically targeted at the 23-year-old son of chief of joint staffs Peter van Uhm, who took over command of the Dutch military on Thursday.
It said two other soldiers were also wounded in the attack north of the Dutch base in the southern province of Uruzgan, one of them critically. The blast came as the troops were returning to their base from a major operation that ended on Thursday.
The deaths bring the total number of Dutch soldiers killed in Afghanistan to 16.
At least two other suicide attacks have hit Nimroz Province this month, including an attack on April 1 that left two policemen dead in Zaranj, and another last Saturday that killed two Indian road construction engineers and their Afghan driver in Khash Rod district.
Suicide attacks in Afghanistan spiked last year, with the Taliban launching more than 140 such missions — the highest number since the radical Islamist group was ousted from power by a US-led invasion in 2001.
In central Ghazni Province, militants ambushed a patrol of Afghan and foreign troops on Thursday in Gilan district. The ensuing clash left nine Taliban fighters dead, district chief Abdul Wali Thofan said. There were no casualties among the troops.
A bomb struck a Canadian military vehicle on Thursday near Spin Boldak, a town on the Pakistani border, said a spokesman for NATO troops in the south. No one died in the blast, but he declined to say whether any soldiers were wounded.
The insurgency has left more than 1,000 people dead so far this year, most of them militants, an Associated Press tally of figures provided by Afghan and Western officials showed.
Meanwhile, NATO acknowledged that a privately contracted helicopter had mistakenly dropped ammunition and other supplies in an area where Afghan officials have said the items were picked up by the Taliban.
NATO’s International Security Assistance Force said on Thursday that the helicopter shipment of food, water and ammunition intended for police was mistakenly dropped in southern Zabul Province.
The head of Afghanistan’s intelligence service, Amrullah Saleh, told a parliamentary security committee on Sunday that Taliban fighters took the supplies.
The force said in a statement that the helicopter was contracted by ISAF to resupply a police outpost in a remote mountainous location last month.
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