Afghan bombs kill five children, wound adviser to President

AFGHANISTAN: A suicide car bomber killed five children in an attack targeting an Afghan government official in a Taliban flashpoint on Monday in the volatile south.

A senior adviser to President Hamid Karzai was hit by a separate bomb attack in eastern Nangarhar province, leaving him and his travelling companion badly wounded, and also injuring five civilians.

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack in the east. Targeted assassinations are a Taliban trademark in their nine-year insurgency against the Western-backed Afghan government and nearly 150,000 US-led foreign troops.

In southern Kandahar province, a suicide bomber detonated a car bomb prematurely, aiming to hit Dand district governor Ahmadullah Nazick but instead killing five children and wounding one other.

“Five children were killed in the first blast and one child is wounded,” said Kandahar deputy police chief Fazel Mohammad Shairzad.

The car bomb was followed by a roadside bomb attack 10 metres (yards) away, after police arrived at the scene, and wounded two policemen, said district criminal investigations chief Mohammad Hussain.

Nazick had been travelling in a convoy along a road in Dand.

An AFP reporter said the dead children were immediately taken away in body bags, leaving the charred body parts of the suicide attacker and small pools of blood at the scene.

In eastern Nangarhar, Waheedullah Sabawoon, adviser on tribal affairs to the president, was on a personal visit in Jalalabad, capital of the province, when a bomb placed in a rickshaw exploded and hit his vehicle. Kandahar, AFP