Suicide Bombing Kills 27 Afghans

By KIRK SEMPLE

KABUL, Afghanistan, Sept. 29 — A suicide bomber wearing an Afghan military uniform approached a bus full of Afghan soldiers on their way to work early today and detonated a belt of explosives concealed beneath his clothes, officials said. The explosion transformed the vehicle into a smoldering husk of twisted steel and killed at least 27 people, including civilians, making it one of the deadliest suicide bombings in Afghanistan this year, officials said.

The early-morning blast was so powerful that it peeled the sides off the bus, catapulted a huge piece of the vehicle into a park across the street and shattered windows in shops and homes around the neighborhood.

Numerous people were wounded in the attack, including day laborers who had gathered nearby in the hope of finding work, according to a statement issued by the Interior Ministry. Some of the laborers were also among the dead, the statement said, though the exact number was not yet known.

Neighborhood residents and shop owners described a deafening blast followed by bedlam as bloody survivors stumbled around screaming for help. Ghulam Jelani, 48, the owner of a bakery no more than 100 yards from the attack, said he was toiling in his kitchen when the explosion occurred.

“I went outside and there was a lot of dust and I couldn’t see anything,” he recalled. “After five minutes I could finally see the bus.”

Initially there were conflicting accounts from officials on the scene about whether the bomber had made it onto the bus. But the Interior Ministry clarified later in the morning that the bomber had detonated himself on the street.

“It’s a very painful incident,” Gen. Muhammad Razzaq Yaqubi, the deputy police chief of Kabul, said at the scene as Afghan and French forensic investigators sifted through the wreckage and two Afghan police officials wandered down the street picking up body parts and dropping them into a blue plastic bag.

While suicide bombings in Iraq have been employed by the Sunni Arab insurgency to target the Shiite civilian population in an apparent effort to incite sectarian tensions, suicide bombers in Afghanistan have mostly attacked Afghan and foreign security forces.

Early this month, the United Nations said that in the first eight months of the year, Afghanistan had suffered a 69 percent increase in suicide bombings over the same period last year.

There have already been 100 bombings this year, killing at least 290 people, according to Afghan and international officials. A record 123 were carried out in 2006, inflicting some 305 deaths.

In the last large-scale suicide bombing in Afghanistan, at least one bomber blew himself up on Sept. 10 in a crowded market in the south, killing at least 26 Afghans, half of them civilians. The last large suicide bombing in the capital occurred in June when a suicide attacker boarded a bus carrying Afghan police trainers and detonated himself, killing 24 people and wounding 35 others.

A former Taliban commander told United Nations investigators that half of all suicide bombers had been foreigners and that “almost all undergo some form of training and preparation in madrasas based in Pakistan,” according to a United Nations report released earlier this month.

“Over 80 percent of suicide attackers pass through recruitment, training facilities or safe houses in North or South Waziristan en route to their targets inside Afghanistan,” the report added.

Many of the bombers appear to be young, poorly educated Afghans who had attended religious schools in Pakistan, investigators found. Suicide bombers also receive support from networks inside Afghanistan.