The blast in Kabul happened during a demonstration by members of the Hazara, a Shiite minority group, near the Afghan Parliament building and Kabul University.
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The protesters Saturday were demanding that a major regional electric power line be routed through their impoverished home province. After the attack, officials intercepted information from Islamic State commanders in the Achin district, the group’s base in eastern Afghanistan where villagers have been terrorized for months, congratulating each other for the carnage, the security official said.
An Afghan interior ministry statement says three suicide bombers assaulted the peaceful demonstrators.
-July 1, 2016: Men armed with knives, automatic rifles and bombs battled police before storming a popular restaurant in an upscale Dhaka neighborhood, taking 35 hostages for hours before killing 20 of them. Haroon Chakhansuri, a spokesman for Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, told the Associated Press that one of the bombers was shot and killed before he could detonate his explosives.
Daud Naji, a member of the Enlighten Movement which organized the marches, said on Sunday that they had been told only that there was a “heightened risk” of attack and had subsequently cancelled nine of 10 planned routes.
Mohammad Ismail Kawousi, a spokesman for the ministry of public health, said the dead and wounded had been taken to nearby hospitals.
Images on social media showed horrific scenes with scores of people wounded in the square where the protesters had gathered.
Ghani issued a statement condemning the attack and saying he was “deeply grieved”.
Police moved trucks and containers into the city overnight Friday to block roads and prevent marchers reaching the city center or the presidential palace. The belt of the second failed to explode and the third attacker was killed by security forces.
Such was the fury of demonstrators, many threw stones at the security forces…
The death toll was the highest of any terror attack in the capital after more than a decade of fighting between Taliban militants and Afghan and North Atlantic Treaty Organisation forces.
“This attack is particularly heinous because it targeted civilians as they exercised their rights to freedom of assembly and freedom of expression”, said Tadamichi Yamamoto, head of the U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan.
“We were holding a peaceful demonstration when I heard a bang and then everyone was escaping and yelling”, said Sabira Jan, a protestor who witnessed the attack and saw bloodied bodies strewn across the ground.
The 500-kilovolt TUTAP power line, which would connect the Central Asian nations of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan with electricity-hungry Afghanistan and Pakistan, was originally set to pass through the central province.
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The government said the project guaranteed ample power to the provinces, Bamyan and Wardak, which lie west of Kabul, and that altering the planned route would delay it by years and cost millions of dollars. Leaders of the marches have said that the rerouting was evidence of bias against the Hazara community, which accounts for up to 15 per cent of Afghanistan’s estimated 30 million-strong population. They are considered the poorest of the country’s ethnic groups, and say they suffer pervasive discrimination.
