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KABUL (Reuters) – A suicide bombing at an educational center in Afghanistan’s capital Kabul killed 24 people, including teenage students, and injured dozens more on Saturday, authorities said.
A spokesman for the Interior Ministry, Tariq Arian, said that security guards had identified an attacker who detonated explosives in the street in front of the Danish center in Kawsar-e.
Most of the victims were students between the ages of 15 and 26, according to the Health Ministry. Fifty-seven were injured in the attack, the Interior Ministry said.
A Taliban spokesman on Twitter denied being responsible for the attack, which came at a sensitive time when teams representing the insurgents and the government met in Qatar to seek a peace deal.
The Islamic State claimed responsibility in a statement on Telegram, without providing evidence.
Family members gathered at a nearby hospital, searching for their missing loved ones among the bags containing the remains of the dead, placed on the hospital floor, while nurses carried injured patients on stretchers for treatment, a witness said. from Reuters.
The attack, which was condemned by NATO and the Afghan government, took place in an area in western Kabul that is home to many members of the country’s Shiite community, a religious minority in Afghanistan that has been attacked in the past by groups such as the Islamic State. .
Dozens of students were killed in the same area of Kabul in an attack on another school in 2018.
A teacher at the Danish Kawsar-e center, who asked not to be identified due to security concerns, said he and the rest of the teaching staff were shocked by the attack on the institution that had provided tutoring to give thousands of children a path to higher education. .
“All the students were full of energy, they belonged to poor families but they hoped for a better future,” he said.
The latest attack came in the wake of heavy fighting in several provinces in recent weeks, which has displaced thousands of civilians.
The US special envoy for Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, in the early hours of Sunday on Twitter, again called for an immediate reduction in violence and an acceleration of the peace process, citing the increase in violence in the country in recent times. weeks, including a finding by the human rights commission that an Afghan government airstrike had killed 12 children.
“How much more can we take, as individuals and as a society? How many times can we get up? “asked Shaharzad Akbar, chairman of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission on Twitter shortly after Saturday’s attack, saying that targeting civilians was a war crime.
Report by Abdul Qadir Sediqi and Orooj Hakimi; Written by Gibran Peshimam and Charlotte Greenfield; Editing by James Drummond and David Holmes
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