Bomber kills 3 at memorial of Karzai's brother

A suicide bomber on Thursday targeted a memorial service for the assassinated brother of the Afghan president, killing three people including a senior cleric and a child.

Local officials said 15 people were wounded when the attacker blew himself up in a mosque in the southern city of Kandahar, where visiting cabinet ministers from the capital Kabul had to be airlifted to safety.

The bombing spotlights renewed instability in Kandahar, one of Afghanistan's bloodiest battlegrounds and the birthplace of the Taliban, in the power vacuum created by the death of powerbroker Ahmed Wali Karzai.

"Now we know that three people were killed and 15 injured in today's suicide attack," said Kandahar governor Toryalai Wesa.

No one claimed responsibility for the bombing, but President Hamid Karzai blamed it on "enemies of the people of Afghanistan", referring to militants who have been fighting his Western-backed government for nearly 10 years.

"The president condemned this terrorist attack in the strongest terms possible," his office said.
The provincial authority and a national lawmaker said a number of high-ranking government officials had been present but were unhurt.

"We'd left the mosque to go to a hall nearby for lunch. The government delegation left 10 minutes before the explosion," said lawmaker Kamal Naser.

Kandahar senator Bismullah Afghan, however, was wounded in the shoulder, his brother said.
An AFP reporter saw the government delegation rapidly evacuated after the attack in two Afghan army helicopters.

The head of the religious council for the southern province of Kandahar, Hikmatullah Hikmat, was among those killed, the interior ministry said.

"The bombing was in a corner of the mosque. It's a big mosque," said ministry spokesman Siddiq Siddiqi.
He confirmed it had been the venue for a service in memory of Wali Karzai, who was shot dead on Tuesday.
The interior ministry said one child was among the dead.

A second explosion of a remotely-detonated bomb planted nearby killed one other civilian and injured two, said provincial police chief Abdul Razeq.

A lawmaker who was at the service said the government delegation included the ministers of defence, justice and public works, as well as deputy ministers of various ministries and 15 MPs.

Wali Karzai was buried by the president at a funeral which drew thousands of mourners in Kandahar on Wednesday, after he was shot dead in his study by a close friend and the commander of his personal protection force.

Ahmad Shah Spah, who leads a movement advocating good governance in the south, said the mosque attack was a sad indication of things to come.

"We will witness increased violence and insecurity in Kandahar and southern Afghanistan in the wake of AWK's death, as other tribes as well as the armed opposition will be trying to use the situation in their favour," he said.

The United Nations announced on Thursday that the number of civilians killed in the Afghan war in the first half of 2011 rose 15 percent, putting the year on track to be the deadliest in a decade.

The disturbing rise in deaths came after the United States sent thousands of extra soldiers into Afghanistan and said levels of violence in the 2011 fighting season would indicate the extent to which the troop surge had worked.

The annual mid-year report by the UN mission in the country said insurgents accounted for 80 percent of all deaths and that Nato troops were responsible for 14 percent of killings, with half of all casualties caused by bomb attacks.

Heightened conflict in the traditional fighting areas in the south and southeast, and the spread of the insurgency west and north, meant "civilians experienced a downward spiral in protection," according to the study.

Karzai on Thursday ordered an immediate investigation into claims from the local government in the eastern province of Khost, that a Nato raid killed six civilians, including an 11-year-old girl.

Nato said its troops killed insurgents associated with the Al-Qaeda-linked Haqqani network during gunfights, but that only one unarmed woman was wounded.

Follow Emirates 24|7 on Google News.