Kabul – At Least 40 Dead In Terror Attack Outside Indian Embassy
July 7, 2008 by national
Filed under World Report
Over 40 people, including four Indians, were killed when a suicide bomber rammed his bomb-laden car into the gates of the Indian Embassy on Monday morning, diplomatic sources said here.
Others killed in the attack, the first of this magnitude on an Indian mission, were local security personnel and Afghans who had queued up for visas to travel to India.
An Indian diplomat, V. Venkateswara Rao, and the military attaché, Brigadier Ravi Datt Mehra, were killed as their car was entering the compound while jawans of the Indo-Tibetan Border Police were questioning the suicide bomber at 10 a.m. The two jawans, Ajai Pathaniya and Roop Singh, were also killed on the spot along with Niamatullah, an Afghan employee of the embassy, Minister of External Affairs Pranab Mukherjee told newspersons in New Delhi.
“The government of India strongly condemns this cowardly terrorist attack on its diplomatic mission in Afghanistan. Such acts of terror will not deter us from fulfilling our commitments to the government and the people of Afghanistan,” Mr. Mukherjee said.
About 10 Afghan security personnel were among those dead or injured. Several shops across the road, including the Indian Airlines office, were damaged and many Afghan shopkeepers injured.
Eyewitness Reports
Witnesses told of body parts hanging from trees and of feverish efforts to help badly injured victims at a key hospital in the Afghan capital.
The BBC’s Martin Patience, reporting from the scene of the attack, said Afghan and international forces had “swarmed” around the blast site in the immediate aftermath of the explosion.
Blue and white tickertape and armed security personnel were keeping curious onlookers about 200 metres away from the Indian embassy, our correspondent reported.
Workers wearing orange boiler suits swept rubble off the road, while others picked through the wreckage of a collapsed wall, he added. Cranes also lifted the remains of cars onto trucks to be taken away.
‘Burnt bodies’
At Kabul’s hospitals, reports of a major explosion prompted a feverish effort to cope with the influx of dead and injured, with support and administrative staff helping doctors and nurses deal with the casualties.
“Today I saw four bodies come in, completely burnt,” Mr Hamdad told the BBC.
