A suicide bomber killed at least 14 people in central Kabul on Friday, the deadliest attack on the Afghan capital in months and the first since US-led troops launched a new assault against the Taliban.
The Islamist militia, which is waging an vicious insurgency against the Western-backed Afghan government and more than 121,000 foreign troops based in the country, claimed responsibility for the attack in a telephone call to AFP.
A large explosion and at least two smaller blasts rang out around the Safi Landmark shopping and hotel complex soon after dawn on Friday, the Muslim holiday and the quietest day in the normally bustling Afghan capital.
Afghan officials said a suicide bomber carried out the attack and that two other would-be attackers were shot dead by police.
Sporadic gunfire rattled through the area as ambulances raced to the scene and grey smoke billowed into the air. Witnesses said people in pyjamas were led from a guesthouse in the area and taken away in ambulances.
The heavily fortified centre of Kabul has been relatively calm since January 18, when Taliban gunmen stormed the city's commercial heart, taking over buildings, detonating suicide vests and killing at least five people.
Shattered glass carpeted the road outside the Park Residence Hotel, a guesthouse frequented by foreigners in the centre of the city. An AFP reporter said there appeared to be a large crater in the road outside.
Police commandos were seen using ladders to scale the glass outside wall of the guesthouse.
An AFP photographer saw terrified people escaping through windows and climbing down scaffolding to escape the Park Residence, and an AFP reporter he saw a body in police uniform being brought out of the hotel.
"A suicide bomber detonated himself in front of a kebab shop near the Safi Landmark," interior ministry spokesman Zemarai Bashary said.
"Two other suicide bombers were shot dead by police in the same area," he said, while playing down witness reports that other gunmen had entered the Safi Landmark buildings.
General Ahmadzia Yaftali, head of Afghan army medical operations, said 10 people were killed, making it the deadliest attack in Kabul since a suicide car bomber targeted a NATO convoy, killing 10 people on August 18, two days before the presidential election.
A Taliban spokesman claimed the attack.
"There were eight of our people. One of them detonated his car bomb in front of the Indians' hotel, two others also carried out suicide bombings. The rest of our people are still there," Zabihullah Mujahed told AFP by telephone.
Friday's assault came one day after the Afghan flag was raised over the town of Marjah, the focus of a US-led offensive designed to evict Taliban militants and reinstate government control in southern Afghanistan.
Around 15,000 US, Afghan and NATO forces are pursuing Operation Mushtarak (Together), billed as the biggest military campaign since the 2001 US-led invasion brought down the Taliban regime.
The operation is aimed at seizing control of the Marjah and Nad Ali areas of Helmand from the Taliban and drug lords, in the first big test of US President Barack Obama's surge of thousands more troops.
The Park Residence was attacked in mid-2005, when a suicide bomber struck the hotel's Internet cafe, at the time was one of the few in the city and as such popular with foreigners and young Afghans alike.
Until recently the low-rise hotel was a regular haunt of aid workers and private contractors. It is adjacent to the eight-story City Centre shopping mall and Safi Landmark Hotel.
The attackers appear to have targeted three points in a triangle between the Park Residence and the Safi Landmark on the main road, and the smaller building believed to be a guesthouse on a sidestreet off the opposite side of the road.
Reports that many of the dead were foreigners -- possibly Indians working in the hotel -- could not be immediately confirmed.
After a December 18 attack on another guesthouse in Kabul killed five UN workers, UN staff have been banned from staying anywhere but secure apartments.
Copyright 2010 AFP South Asian Edition
