Taliban suicide bomber blows up near Kabul airport, EU vehicle targeted

Kabul: The suicide bombing near the airport's entrance in Afghan capital Kabul that killed three, targeted a foreign vehicle that belonged to the European Union Police Mission in Afghanistan, report said Sunday.

Out of the three killed, two were Afghan teenage girls and one was a EUPOL worker.

“Two EUPOL’s vehicles were there at the time of the attack. The one killed inside a vehicle was a foreigner who worked for EUPOL,” Aziz Basam, senior press officer with the European Union Police Mission in Afghanistan (EUPOL), told AFP.

The responsibility for the attack was claimed by the Taliban, who launched their spring offensive across Afghanistan last month.

"A suicide attack carried out on foreign forces near the gate of Kabul airport," the AFP quoted Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid writing on Twitter.

Interior Ministry spokesman Sediq Sediqqi said two Afghan “passers-by” girls were killed in the blast. Of the 18 wounded, he said eight were women and three were children. He said three foreigners had been wounded. EUPOL's website said three of its personnel had sustained non-fatal injuries.

The car bomb was detonated near the office of the Afghan Civil Aviation Authority, which is a few hundred meters (yards) from the airport terminal, early Sunday morning, said Najib Danish, the deputy spokesman for the Interior Ministry.

Nearby homes and shops were damaged, and the road — choked with traffic throughout the day as vehicles pass through a slow-moving checkpoint into the airport — was strewn with the charred remains of a number of cars.

Danish said that one foreign vehicle and two civilian vehicles were damaged in the blast.

The insurgents claimed responsibility for an attack on a Kabul guesthouse last week that left 14 people dead, including nine foreigners.

Earlier Sunday, a magnetic bomb attached to a vehicle exploded in the eastern suburbs of Kabul, wounding one person, Sediqqi said. And late Saturday, an explosion inside the campus of Kabul University wounded two people, he said.