Sixteen people were killed after militants stormed the American University of Afghanistan in Kabul, officials said Thursday, in a almost 10-hour raid that prompted anguished pleas for help from trapped students.
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Reports said the dead also included three police officers, two university guards, and a teacher. It began when one assailant detonated a auto bomb outside of the university, which was founded in 2006, during evening classes.
Other than 12 killings in the attack, hundreds of students fleeing in panic before the assault ended when two gunmen were shot dead.
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.
Massoud Hossaini, a photographer for The Associated Press, tweeted that he was trapped inside during the attack. “He shot at me and shattered the glass”, Hossaini said, adding that he fell on the glass and cut his hands.
Hossaini said at least two grenades were thrown into the room, wounding several classmates.
The American University began teaching in 2005 and is chartered in the U.S. It enrols some 1,700 students and has been seen as a high-value target by militants, particularly as foreign staff are often employed there.
No one has claimed the university attack yet.
The attack comes two weeks after two university staff, an American and an Australian, were kidnapped from their vehicle by unknown gunmen. Twenty of us were in the class.
“Many students jumped from the second floor, some broke their legs and some hurt their head trying to escape”, said Abdullah Fahimi, a student who escaped.
NEWS BRIEF An explosion and gunfire have been reported at a university in Kabul, according to the school’s president.
We also want to thank the Afghan government and Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) for their response to the attack and their ongoing assistance to AUAF. The university closed the evening the professors were abducted, on August 7, and reopened August 10. University authorities could not immediately be reached to comment.
Police spokesman Sediq Sediqqi said police and intelligence agency personnel are at the campus, on the western outskirts of Kabul.
Their whereabouts are still unknown and no group so far has publicly claimed responsibility for the abductions, the latest in a series of kidnappings of foreigners in the conflict-torn country. Spokesman Adam Stump said the forces had been embedded with the Afghan units. “I don’t want to conjecture [about] why we were attacked but I can tell you that as a university we are doing all we can to advance education of the young people in this country”. “Our travel warning for Afghanistan warns US citizens against travel to Afghanistan because of the continued instability and threats by terror attacks against USA citizens”, she said.
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U.S. State Department spokeswoman Elizabeth Trudeau said there were “small numbers” of North Atlantic Treaty Organisation advisers who were assisting their Afghan counterparts.
