An Afghan official says the death toll in today’s bombing of a mass protest in Kabul has risen to 61.
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Ministry of Health officials say that at least 61 people were killed and 207 were injured in the attack, according to The Associated Press and Reuters.
Afghan volunteers move the bodies of victims at the scene of a suicide attack that targeted crowds of minority Shiite Hazaras during a demonstration at the Deh Mazang Circle of Kabul on Saturday.
Much of the city centre had been sealed off with stacks of shipping containers and other obstacles as the march began earlier on Saturday, and security was tight with helicopters patrolling overhead.
The protests by a group whose leaders include members of the national unity government have put pressure on President Ashraf Ghani, who has faced growing opposition from both inside and outside the government.
“We had intelligence over recent days and it was shared with the demonstration organizers, we shared our concerns because we knew that terrorists wanted to bring sectarianism to our community”, presidential spokesman Haroon Chakhansuri said.
The Amnesty International also condemned the attack, saying this horrific attack on a group of peaceful protestors in Kabul demonstrates the utter disregard that armed groups have for human life.
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 planned to pass through Bamiyan, one of the most deprived areas of Afghanistan.
The Taliban, who are in the middle of their annual summer offensive and are more powerful than IS, strongly denied any involvement in the attack. The last one in May attracted tens of thousands.
Violence had been widely feared at what was the second demonstration by Hazaras over the power line issue.
Hazara politcal leaders had attended the May demonstrations, but wee notable by their absence on Saturday.
A bloodied man who carried dead and wounded, speaks on the phone at the site of a suicide attack an explosion that struck a protest march, in Kabul, A.
Accounting for up to one-fifth of Afghanistan’s population, Hazaras, a Persian-speaking people who mainly live in central Afghanistan, have always been branded outsiders for their Shia faith and far Asian features in the country dominated by followers of the Sunni branch of Islam, according to a 2008 National Georgraphic article.
The Persian-speaking Hazara, a mainly Shia group estimated to make up about 9 percent of the population, are Afghanistan’s third-largest minority but they have long suffered discrimination.
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Waving Afghan flags and chanting slogans like “Justice!” and “Death to discrimination!”, demonstrators had gathered near Kabul University, several kilometres from the main government area. Bamiyan province, where most Hazara people live in the central highlands, is poverty stricken, though it is largely peaceful and has potential as a tourist destination.
