Fraidoon Obaidi, chief of the Kabul police Criminal Investigation Department, told Reuters 44 people were wounded, including 35 students.
Advertisement
The assault began just before 7 p.m. Wednesday – a time when hundreds of students typically attend evening classes at the prestigious university – with a suicide vehicle bombing at the university’s entrance. The siege of the university lasted nearly nine hours, before police killed the two assailants around 3:30 a.m., he added. It’s the only private, nonprofit coed university in the country and has about 1,700 full- and part-time students, CNN reported.
“From behind its fortified walls, the university has operated relatively unscathed since it opened in 2006”, NPR’s Jacki Lyden noted at the time.
Dejan Panic, the program director at Kabul’s Emergency Hospital, said 18 people wounded in the attack, including five women, had been admitted to the hospital.
The attack was “organised and orchestrated” from Pakistan, his office said in a separate statement, adding that Ghani spoke to Pakistan’s powerful army chief General Raheel Sharif to demand “serious measures against the terrorists”.
“I heard explosions and gunfire is going on close by… our classroom is filled with smoke and dust”, an anxious student told AFP by telephone, before fleeing the campus. “He shot at me and shattered the glass”.
He remembered that moment when he and his colleagues understood they could not escape and tried to put up a defence by pushing chairs and desks against the door of the classroom where they were, ABC News said.
Hossaini said at least two grenades were thrown into the room, wounding several classmates.
Fifteen students were with Hossaini, the Associated Press photographer who studies political science at the university, when they first heard the explosion on the southern side of the institution’s campus.
“Most of the dead were killed by gun shots near the windows of their classrooms”, Sediqqi said.
During the attack, Jennifer Glasse, reporting from Kabul, told our Newscast unit that dozens of police, security forces and special forces had surrounded the campus.
Afghan special forces, with help from USA and North Atlantic Treaty Organisation military advisers, surrounded the walled compound and eventually worked their way inside.
No group has taken credit for the attack, which came less than three weeks after Australian and American faculty members were kidnapped by men dressed in Afghan National Police uniforms. Their whereabouts still remain unknown.
Advertisement
University President Mark English spoke to NPR on Thursday morning, describing the attack as a “huge blow”.
