A suicide attack outside a CIA base killed one civilian and wounded two security guards yesterday in eastern Afghanistan, an Afghan official said.
The blast happened outside Camp Chapman, the same base that was hit in December in one of the worst attacks in the history of the US intelligence agency, said Mubarez Zadran, a spokesman for the provincial governor.
The base is in Khost Province, a dangerous region southeast of the capital.
The suicide bomber was in a car packed with explosives, the Afghan Interior Ministry said in a statement. The victims were all Afghans, the ministry said.
The Taliban claimed responsibility soon after the attack.
In December, seven CIA employees and a Jordanian intelligence officer were killed when a suicide bomber detonated his cache of explosives at Camp Chapman.
In northern Afghanistan, eight Norwegian soldiers serving with NATO’s International Security Assistance Force were injured, two of them seriously, in an attack, the Norwegian military said yesterday.
The Norwegian troops had been heading to meet Afghan security forces in the northern Ghormach district on Sunday afternoon when they came under attack, and a six-hour firefight ensued, the military said.
“The two seriously injured soldiers are being treated at a German field hospital in Mazar-i-Sharif. We think their lives are no longer in danger, but they suffered very serious wounds,” military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel John Espen Lien said.
The attackers also slightly wounded six other Norwegian troops with bullets and shrapnel.
The Norwegian soldiers finally managed to withdraw when they received reinforcements and air support.
“No casualties among the insurgents have so far been reported,” the military said in a statement.
In eastern Afghanistan, eight civilians, two of them children, were killed and 14 more wounded when a roadside bomb struck a minivan, police and a doctor said yesterday.
The victims were among a group of people traveling in Paktia Province late on Sunday when the bomb exploded, deputy provincial police chief Ghulam Dastagir Rustamyar said.
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