Three suicide bombers detonated at the gates of a government compound in southern Afghanistan yesterday, killing five policemen, an official said.
The bombers struck at the governor’s compound in the city of Kandahar, said Ahmad Wali Karzai, head of the provincial council and a brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
“There were three explosions. One of the suicide bombers exploded on the outer side of the gate and two others on the inner side of the gate,” he said.
“Five policemen have been martyred and three others injured. No senior official was hurt,” Ahmad Wali Karzai said.
An interior ministry spokesman in the capital Kabul earlier confirmed three explosions, with at least two carried out by suicide bombers, and put the initial death toll at three policemen with another three wounded.
“The first bomber set off his bombs while he was being searched by police at the gate of the compound, which houses the provincial governor and other provincial government officials,” said the spokesman, Zemarai Bashary.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack, but Kandahar is a notorious flashpoint in an escalating Taliban insurgency against the Western-backed Afghan government nearly eight years after the US-led invasion.
Mohammad Akbar, an Afghan soldier and ambulance driver whose hands and uniform were soaked in blood, said that he helped evacuate the injured.
“I evacuated up to 10 injured to hospital and saw some bodies but I did not touch or count them,” he said at the scene.
Canadian troops and Afghan security forces sealed off the area, where a burqa-clad woman sobbed as ambulances raced through town, an Agence France-Presse reporter said.
Yesterday’s attack came just over three weeks after four suicide attackers stormed a provincial council compound in the same city and killed 13 people, including senior government officials, in an assault claimed by the Taliban.
Separately, a spokesman for the NATO-led force in Afghanistan said yesterday that an air strike killed at least six suspected insurgents in the central province of Wardak during ground clashes with militants.
“We can confirm there was an incident in Wardak involving an air strike. There were no civilian casualties. We can confirm between six and eight insurgents were killed,” the spokesman said.
An international soldier was also wounded during the operation, he said.
THE ‘MONSTER’: The Philippines on Saturday sent a vessel to confront a 12,000-tonne Chinese ship that had entered its exclusive economic zone The Philippines yesterday said it deployed a coast guard ship to challenge Chinese patrol boats attempting to “alter the existing status quo” of the disputed South China Sea. Philippine Coast Guard spokesman Commodore Jay Tarriela said Chinese patrol ships had this year come as close as 60 nautical miles (111km) west of the main Philippine island of Luzon. “Their goal is to normalize such deployments, and if these actions go unnoticed and unchallenged, it will enable them to alter the existing status quo,” he said in a statement. He later told reporters that Manila had deployed a coast guard ship to the area
RISING TENSIONS: The nations’ three leaders discussed China’s ‘dangerous and unlawful behavior in the South China Sea,’ and agreed on the importance of continued coordination Japan, the Philippines and the US vowed to further deepen cooperation under a trilateral arrangement in the face of rising tensions in Asia’s waters, the three nations said following a call among their leaders. Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr and outgoing US President Joe Biden met via videoconference on Monday morning. Marcos’ communications office said the leaders “agreed to enhance and deepen economic, maritime and technology cooperation.” The call followed a first-of-its-kind summit meeting of Marcos, Biden and then-Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida in Washington in April last year that led to a vow to uphold international
US president-elect Donald Trump is not typically known for his calm or reserve, but in a craftsman’s workshop in rural China he sits in divine contemplation. Cross-legged with his eyes half-closed in a pose evoking the Buddha, this porcelain version of the divisive US leader-in-waiting is the work of designer and sculptor Hong Jinshi (洪金世). The Zen-like figures — which Hong sells for between 999 and 20,000 yuan (US$136 to US$2,728) depending on their size — first went viral in 2021 on the e-commerce platform Taobao, attracting national headlines. Ahead of the real-estate magnate’s inauguration for a second term on Monday next week,
‘PLAINLY ERRONEOUS’: The justice department appealed a Trump-appointed judge’s blocking of the release of a report into election interference by the incoming president US Special Counsel Jack Smith, who led the federal cases against US president-elect Donald Trump on charges of trying to overturn his 2020 election defeat and mishandling of classified documents, has resigned after submitting his investigative report on Trump, an expected move that came amid legal wrangling over how much of that document can be made public in the days ahead. The US Department of Justice disclosed Smith’s departure in a footnote of a court filing on Saturday, saying he had resigned one day earlier. The resignation, 10 days before Trump is inaugurated, follows the conclusion of two unsuccessful criminal prosecutions
RSS