Kabul: A suicide bombing near the the Afghan Supreme Court in central Kabul during the evening rush hour has killed more than a dozen people and wounded many more, officials said.
Witnesses said a suicide bomber walked up to the entrance of the court as workers were leaving and set off his explosives on Tuesday local time.
No one has yet claimed responsibility for the attack.
A spokesman for the Taliban said that the group was looking into whether the bomber was one of its fighters. The group in the past has claimed responsibility for many court-related assaults, including provincial courtrooms and buses carrying court employees.
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Wahidullah Mayar, the senior public relations adviser to the Ministry of Public Health, said 20 people were killed, including three women and one child, and 41 others were wounded. Police officials put the casualties at 13 dead and 25 wounded as of Tuesday night.
The attack comes a day after the United Nations expressed concern about a record number of civilian casualties in the country. A report by the world body's mission in Afghanistan said 3498 civilians were killed and 7920 were wounded in 2016.
In response to the report, the Taliban in a statement criticised the United Nations for the criteria it had used in defining someone as a civilian. The insurgents mentioned, in particular, those "who issue execution orders" of their fighters - essentially saying they did not consider court workers to be civilians.
President Ashraf Ghani, who was visiting the remote province of Nuristan, where more than 50 people died in recent avalanches, condemned the attack as another terrorist act by "the enemies of Afghanistan."
The Supreme Court was locked down after the attack out of fear that gunmen might storm the building.
"The time the blast happened - it was right when Supreme Court employees were leaving work for home," said Sediq Zhobel, head of broadcasting at the court. Zhobel said the occupants of the building were put under lockdown before security forces came in and cleared them through a different gate.
Mohammad Reza, 63, who lives nearby, said the blast was powerful enough to shatter his windows.
"I saw several bodies on ground, most of them were dead and some were wounded," he said. "About a dozen ambulances came to transfer the victims to hospital."
New York Times
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