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U.N. worker, 2 others die in Afghan blast
A U.N. engineer from Myanmar was among three people killed when a suicide attacker walked into a Kabul Internet cafe and blew himself up, officials said Sunday, in the first fatal attack on a U.N. staffer in the capital since the fall of the Taliban in 2001. The bombing on Saturday followed a series of kidnap attempts on foreigners and the killing of a British development worker, deepening a sense of insecurity in the city just as a Taliban-led insurgency revives in the south. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan condemned the killings and called upon the government of Afghanistan and international forces here "to take the necessary measures to address the security situation," his spokesman Farhan Hag said in New York. Afghanistan's top law-enforcer promised a thorough investigation and said police were erecting extra checkpoints around the country. "There are criminal elements who have a lot to gain by destabilizing Afghanistan and halting and reversing the progress the country has made," Interior Minister Ali Ahmad Jalali said. "We will never allow that to happen." The U.S. ambassador condemned the targeting of an Internet cafe as an attack on "Afghans' desire to be part of the larger world." "The fact that this terrorist chose a place where Afghans and visitors visited to freely gather and exchange information is not surprising," Zalmay Khalilzad said. "These tyrants fear truth." Officials said witnesses recalled a man entering the Park Internet Cafe in the upscale Shahr-e-Naw district on Saturday afternoon and going straight to the restroom. The explosion occurred just after he re-emerged. U.N. spokeswoman Ariane Quentier identified one of the victims as an employee of the U.N. Office for Project Services. She said the man was a Myanmar national, but did not release his name. Gen. Nazar Mohammed Nekzad, the lead Afghan investigator, said the man had been working on a road project in southern Afghanistan. Another of the three victims appeared to be a suicide bomber, because of the severe mutilation of his body, Interior Ministry spokesman Latfullah Mashal said. The third fatality and five people wounded were Afghan customers. Police detained five people including the owner of the cafe for questioning. The attack was the first to kill a U.N. staffer in the capital since the fall of the Taliban in 2001. Quentier insisted the latest incident would not restrict the operations of the U.N., which is organizing Sept. 18 parliamentary elections. She declined to comment on extra U.N. safety measures. But some embassies and relief organizations ordered foreign staff to restrict their movements. The roughly 3,000-strong expatriate community in Kabul was already on edge over warnings that criminals might kidnap foreigners to exchange for six men recently arrested over the monthlong kidnapping of three U.N. workers last year. Jalali said police already thwarted several attempts — an apparent reference to a group of World Bank employees and a worker for Christian relief group who reportedly evaded armed abductors in two incidents since Thursday. Police have suggested that the same criminal group was involved in the shooting death of a British development worker on March 7, but have released no evidence to back up that claim. An American civilian was briefly seized in Kabul last month, but escaped by throwing himself from the trunk of a moving car. Two NATO soldiers were killed in well-executed suicide attacks in January 2004. Another suicide bomber killed an American woman in a shopping street in October and a car bomb killed at least seven people at a U.S. security firm in August. |
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