KABUL – The casualty toll in Saturday’s ambulance bomb attack in the Afghan capital Kabul has, so far, risen to at least 63 dead and 151 wounded, but the total may rise further, a health ministry official said.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for Saturday’s suicide blast. They also claimed the attack on the Intercontinental Hotel a week earlier in which more than 20 people were killed.
An interior ministry spokesman blamed the Haqqani network, a militant group affiliated with the Taliban which Afghan and Western officials consider to be behind many of the biggest attacks on urban targets in Afghanistan.
Hours after the blast, a health ministry spokesman said the casualty toll had risen to at least 95 killed and 158 wounded.
As medical teams struggled to handle the casualties pouring in, some of the wounded were laid out in the open, with intravenous drips set up next to them in hospital gardens.
“It’s a massacre,” said Dejan Panic, coordinator in Afghanistan for the Italian aid group Emergency, which runs a nearby trauma hospital that treated dozens of wounded.
The latest attack will add pressure on President Ashraf Ghani and his U.S. allies, who have expressed growing confidence that a new more aggressive military strategy has succeeded in driving Taliban insurgents back from major provincial centers.
Saturday is a working day in Afghanistan and the streets were full when the blast went off at around lunchtime in a busy part of the city near a number of foreign embassies and government buildings.
The casualty toll is the worst since 150 people were killed in a truck bomb explosion last May near the German embassy, not far from Saturday’s blast, an attack that prompted a major reinforcement of security in the city.