Bomb Blast in Afghanistan's West Kills 10

Source: Associated Press

Bomb blast in Afghanistan's west kills 10

By ALFRED de MONTESQUIOU, Associated Press Writer – 17 mins ago

KABUL – A remote-controlled bomb exploded Monday in western Afghanistan's main city, killing 10 people and critically wounding a district police chief — the main target of the attack.
The bomb went off on a crowded street near a fruit market in Herat. It injured 30 people, said Raouf Ahmedi, the top police spokesman in western Afghanistan.

The target was Mohamma Issa, the police chief for nearby Injil district, who was driving into town. He was transferred to a NATO-run hospital in critical condition, Ahmedi said.
Local police officials initially reported 12 dead. But the head of the regional health department, Dr. Ghulam Said Rashid, confirmed 10 were killed: a woman, a young girl, six men and two police officers.

Ahmedi said the blast blew out windows in a 100-yrd (meter) radius and several casualties were fruit vendors. Witnesses said the bomb left a one-yard (meter) wide crater in the street and damaged two police vehicles.

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Meanwhile in the north of the country, an ambush on Korean road engineers left one of their Afghan drivers dead on Monday, an official said. The attack occurred at a construction site where a large number of Korean engineers and Afghan workers were building a road, said Abdelsatar Barez, the deputy governor for Faryab province, which borders Turkmenistan. A day earlier, insurgents attacked a northern police checkpoint in the old city of Baghlan, the Interior Ministry said. Eight militants and two police died in the ensuing gunbattle, the ministry said in a statement Monday.

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