Kabul suicide blast death toll rises to 64

The death toll from a Taliban suicide attack in Kabul has more than doubled to 64, officials said on Wednesday, making it the deadliest militant assault in the Afghan capital for years.

The brazen attack on Tuesday on a security services office in the heart of Kabul is seen as the opening salvo in 2016’s Taliban spring offensive, launched last week.

A powerful Taliban truck bomb tore through central Kabul and a fierce firefight broke out, sending clouds of smoke billowing into the sky and rattling windows several kilometres away.

“It is with regret that I announce that 64 people were killed and 347 others wounded in yesterday’s Kabul attack,” ministry spokesman Sediq Sediqqi told reporters. “Most of them are civilians.”

The ministry had earlier put the death toll at 30.

“The victims of (the) terrorist attack are all fathers, brothers or children of people,” Afghan President Ashraf Ghani said on Twitter. “We will avenge every drop of Afghan blood.”

The Taliban claimed three “martyrdom seekers” carried out an attack on the National Directorate of Security, the main spy agency. One of them, it said, managed to slip away alive.

Afghan authorities insisted the building, used by NDS in the past, housed an elite security agency charged with protecting top government officials.

Mourners in Kabul held emotionally charged funerals on Wednesday for the victims of the attack, one of the deadliest in Kabul for years.

“The government is unable to stop these attacks on the people,” said Abdul Basir Mobasher, a relative of a security official who was killed in the attack. “The people will be forced to rise up in revolt if these attacks don’t stop.”

The attack underscores concerns raised in a new United Nations report, which highlighted a spike in civilian casualties during the first three months of the year due to an increase in urban warfare.

“The Taliban exposed the hollowness of their recent vow to ‘safeguard and protect the lives and properties of the civilian people’, by launching a massive suicide attack in central Kabul,” Human Rights Watch said in a statement. “Those responsible for deliberately carrying out such an attack committed a war crime.”