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Four police officers were killed and dozens of civilians injured yesterday in three separate attacks in Afghanistan, officials said. |
A suicide bomber detonated his explosives-laden truck near a police checkpoint in the Nawzad district, an incident in which four police officers were killed and five others were injured, said Omar Zwak, spokesman for the governor of Helmand province, where the incident took place.
Meanwhile, more than 30 worshippers were injured in an explosion inside a mosque in the eastern province of Nangarhar.
“The explosives placed in a mosque in the Khogiyani district went off during Friday prayers,” Provincial police spokesman Hazrat Hossain Mashreqiwal said, adding that the mullah was among the injured.
District governor Nematullah said seven of those injured were in critical condition.
Taliban militants, who are usually accused of such attacks, condemned the bombing in the mosque, saying the “cunning enemy (referring to the Afghan government) had carried it out to create distance between mujahideen and the nation.”
Another bomb placed in a cart wounded three civilians in the city of Mazar-e-Sharif, the provincial capital of Balkh in northern Afghanistan, police spokesman Sher Jan Durrani said.
Afghanistan has experienced regular attacks since the government signed military agreements with the United States and Nato allowing some 12,000 foreign soldiers to remain in the country after combat troops withdraw at the end of December.
On Thursday, a suicide car bomber hit a British embassy vehicle in the eastern part of Kabul city, an attack in which six people including two embassy personnel were killed.
Multiple observers have predicted rising violence through 2014 and 2015. They have so far been proved right. Currently, colder weather is restricting the insurgents’ military operations. Once the winter has passed, the killing will resume at a new intensified level in Kabul, in other cities and in rural zones.
