A suicide car bomber plowed a Toyota into rush-hour traffic on a commercial boulevard in Kabul on Thursday morning, killing at least four civilians and wounding up to 17, the police and hospital authorities said. The bomber was apparently aiming at a passing convoy of NATO troops, the Interior Ministry said in a statement, but several witnesses said there were no security forces, either Afghan or foreign, in the immediate vicinity of the blast.The explosion occurred about 150 meters, or 500 feet, from a major traffic circle and a heavily guarded entrance to an access road leading to the U.S. Embassy, raising speculation that the bomber may have intended to blow himself up there but detonated his device prematurely. The embassy was playing host at a Thanksgiving Day fun run beginning at 9 a.m., so Americans and other Westerners were entering the embassy compound when the bomb went off, The Associated Press reported.
According to witnesses, the car was weaving through traffic, then hit a pedestrian and a series of cars before exploding. "I thought he was drunk," said Salih Muhammad, 35, a street cleaner who was working on that stretch of road when the attack occurred. "Then there was this huge explosion."
Two other cleaning crew members were wounded in the blast, and co-workers rushed them to a nearby hospital. Muhammad stood with another street cleaner outside the emergency room waiting for news of their colleagues. His hands and orange work clothes were covered in the blood of one of his colleagues whom he had carried from the street.
Noor Agah Akramzada, director of the hospital, said he had received 10 of the wounded and the body of one of the victims. Officials at a military hospital in the neighborhood said they had received at least seven other wounded civilians.
Within minutes of the attack, the victims had been carted away and government investigators had begun sifting through the wreckage. But more than an hour later, the bloodied, twisted body of the suicide bomber still lay in the street, about 50 meters from the blast site where only the mangled front end of his car remained.
Qari Ayob, 37, the owner of a small store near the blast site, said he was in his shop at the time of the attack. "At first I felt a huge flame and then heard a very big explosion," he said. "I felt as if the flame came into my shop. Then a darkness came, and it blinded me for a while." As he spoke, workers were cleaning up his shattered shop window. The store would remain open, Ayob said. "There is no alternative," he said. "This is my job. I need to continue."