Up to 25 wounded
A suicide bomber on a motorbike killed at least four Afghan security personnel and wounded up to 25 people in an area of Kabul close to government ministries and parliament, government officials said.
The attack in the Afghan capital targeted a minibus carrying employees of Afghanistan’s intelligence agency, the National Directorate of Security (NDS). Up to 25 people were wounded, acting Health Minister Suraya Dalil told Tolo television, but she did not immediately know whether any civilians were among the casualties.
"The number of casualties that police have taken to hospital is four martyred," interior ministry spokesman Zemarai Bashary told AFP.
Health ministry spokesman Ghulam Sakhi Nuroghli said that 29 wounded had been registered by a hospital close to the scene of the blast.
"And one of the wounded is in a critical condition," Nuroghli told AFP.
Bashary would not say if the bomb targeted an NDS vehicle, but an NDS official at the scene said the minibus was carrying its employees to work when it was struck by the blast.
Witnesses reported seeing fragments of a motorcycle and human body parts likely to be from a suicide attacker.
Responsibility claimed
An AFP photographer on the scene said that a minibus and car had been badly damaged in the blast, which took place in front of a psychiatric hospital and close to a mosque just after 8:00 am (0330 GMT)
The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, said spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid.
The attack came as U.S. Vice President Joe Biden visited Afghanistan to assess a shift in security responsibilities to Afghan troops from foreign forces in a near-decade long war against a Taliban-led insurgency.
He said in Kabul on Wednesday the momentum of the Taliban has been "largely arrested", echoing the findings of a war strategy review released by President Barack Obama last month.
Violence is at its worst since U.S.-backed Afghan forces ousted the Islamist government in 2001 after it refused to hand over al-Qaeda militants, including Osama bin Laden, following the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States.
However attacks in the Afghan capital had been relatively rare in the past year, particularly since a "ring of steel" was erected in the city before a parliamentary election in September.
Last two militants wearing suicide vests attacked a bus of Afghan army officers in Kabul, killing five and wounding nine. The Taliban claimed responsibility for that assault, the first major attack in the Afghan capital since May, when six foreign troops were killed by a large suicide car bomb.
Then last week a bomb in a bag in downtown Kabul killed a policeman and wounded two civilians.
The insurgency has spread out of its traditional strongholds in the south and east over the past two years into once peaceful areas of the north and west
Previous attacks
On Friday, a suicide bomber killed 17 people, including a police commander, inside a Spin Boldak public bathhouse in southern Kandahar province in the Afghanistan’s worst attack in more than five months. Then on Monday another suicide bomber in Spin Boldak killed two policemen and one civilian.
Last year a record 711 foreign troops were killed, according to a monitoring website, up from 521 in 2009.
Afghan security forces have been hit even harder than foreign troops. A total of 1,292 Afghan police and 821 Afghan soldiers were killed in 2010, according to the Afghan government.
Ordinary Afghans, however, have borne the brunt of the fighting. The United Nations has said 2,412 civilians were killed and 3,803 wounded in the first ten months of last year, a 20 percent increase on 2009.
More than three-quarters of the civilians were killed or wounded by insurgent attacks, the United Nations said last month, in a report which the Taliban rejected as "fabricated".
The Afghan government has said 5,225 insurgents were killed last year and there are about 140,000 international troops in Afghanistan fighting Taliban militants.