KABUL: A suicide bomber blew himself up at a park yesterday in northern Afghanistan, killing at least 10 people, including three NATO service members, officials said, the latest in a string of attacks as spring fighting season gets under way.Abdul Satar Barez, deputy governor of Faryab, said the attack occurred about 10:30 a.m. near a park in downtown Maimanah. The bomber was riding a motorcycle when he detonated his explosives at the gate of the park in Maimanah, the capital of Faryab province, police spokesman Lal Mohammad Ahmad Zai said. It was not clear what was targeted, but he said four of those killed were police officers.
Associated Press video footage of the scene of the attack showed what appear to be dead Afghan civilians, police and foreign troops at the explosion site. Body parts were strewn around the gate and on the ground and blood was spattered everywhere.
Faryab is relatively calm, but it is considered to be a stronghold of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, or IMU, an Al-Qaeda affiliated group that has been most active in the northern provinces of Afghanistan.
On March 26, a joint Afghan and coalition force killed the groupÂ’s leader in Afghanistan, Makhdum Nusrat and detained two other insurgents. The coalition said Nusrat had been leading attacks against Afghan and coalition troops in the north for the past eight months and had been plotting the assassination of a member of Parliament in Kabul.
NATO said three of its service members were killed in a bombing yesterday in northern Afghanistan. It provided no other details about the attack or the nationalities of the three and did not confirm a link to the Maimanah attack. It was the only attack in the north yesterday.