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Suicide bomber injures 3
 A suicide bomber blew himself up and wounded three civilians on Friday afternoon as he tried to ram his car into a convoy of NATO peacekeepers in western Kabul, not far from the new building where legislators are set to gather Monday for the opening of Afghanistan's first Parliament in 30 years.
| They're still not real good at that suicide booming thing. The one in Mazar yesterday didn't hurt anybody except for the boom boy, either. |
| Mutual of Kabul is going to cancel his policy, sure 'nough ... |
The soldiers, from Norway, escaped unharmed, although one jeep was slightly damaged, said a statement from the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force in Kabul. Witnesses said that the bomber had missed the two Norwegian armored jeeps, but that one caught fire momentarily. A Taliban spokesman claimed responsibility for the blast in a telephone call to Reuters, and said the attacker had intended to strike at the refurbished Parliament compound but took the opportunity to attack NATO soldiers when he saw them.
Somewhat lacking in fixity of purpose, is was he? |
He said there would be more bombings before the Parliament opened. "This Parliament is a symbol of American occupation of our country," he said by telephone from an undisclosed location somewhere in Pakistan. "It is not representative of the people of Afghanistan. It is a bogus body. We will continue to target such symbols in the future."
| "We don't care if they voted for it or not. We'll tell 'em who they need to represent them, and that'll be us. Until it's us, anything else is bogus!" |
Witnesses said they had rushed to help two men wounded in the attack, a passing motorcyclist and a man on a bicycle, as ammunition inside the bomber's car continued to explode. Masood Amiri, 25, a carpet dealer who had just moved back to Afghanistan after living in the United States for 20 years, said he and other witnesses had put the two men into a car and sent them to the hospital, "because, you know, there's no ambulance service here." A third injured man was later seen walking home.
| That's probably the saddest statement in the entire article. |
A police investigator, Maj. Zaher, who uses only one name, said the police had found wires, parts of a pressure cooker and two large ammunition shells in the wreckage, indicating that a bomb had been rigged up in the car. "He blew himself up early," before the vehicle hit the soldiers' jeeps, the investigator said.
Debris from the passenger car was scattered across the road and up to 100 yards around. "In our opinion," Major Zaher said, "these people are trained by Al Qaeda and are doing this wherever they want."
| Thank you for today's statement of the obvious. |
In a separate incident, the police reported that suspected Taliban militants dragged a teacher out of his schoolroom in southern Afghanistan on Thursday and shot him to death outside the school gate. The killing occurred in the Nadali district of the southern province of Helmand, where the Taliban have made numerous attacks on police officers and American troops, as well as on tribal elders, mullahs and a candidate for Parliament. The teacher, known by the single name Laghmani, had received threats to stop teaching, the provincial police chief, Abdul Rahman Sabir, told Reuters.
Posted by: Dan Darling 2005-12-17 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=137614 |
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