Explosion, gunfire hit military hospital in Kabul, 19 dead: Reports

Mangalore Today News Network

Kabul, Nov 02, 2021: At least 19 people were killed and 50 wounded after two explosions followed by gunfire rocked Afghanistan’s biggest military hospital in Kabul, according to a report in AFP.

 

Photographs shared by residents showed a plume of smoke over the area of the blasts near the former diplomatic zone in the Wazir Akbar Khan area in central Kabul.

Taliban Interior ministry spokesman Qari Saeed Khosty said the explosions took place at the entrance of the 400-bed Sardar Mohammad Daud Khan hospital.

"Security forces are deployed to the area, there is no information about casualties," he said on Twitter.

"Nineteen dead bodies and about 50 wounded people have been taken to hospitals in Kabul," a health ministry official who asked not to be named told AFP.

A health worker at the hospital, who managed to escape the site, said he heard a large explosion followed by a couple of minutes of gunfire. About ten minutes later, there was a second, larger explosion, he told Reuters.

He said it was unclear whether the blasts and the gunfire were inside the sprawling hospital complex, the largest military hospital in Afghanistan.

While there was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack, but the official Bakhtar news agency quoted witnesses saying a number of Islamic State fighters entered the hospital and clashed with security forces.

The Islamic State, which has carried out a series of attacks on mosques and other targets since the Taliban’s seizure of Kabul in August, attacked the 400-bed hospital in 2017, killing more than 30 people.

Courtesy:India Today