Agence France-Presse,
KABUL: A suicide attacker slammed a bomb-filled car into an Afghan army bus in Kabul Wednesday, killing at least 16 people in the second such blast in two days during a visit by US Defence Secretary Robert Gates.
The extremist Taliban group claimed responsibility for the morning rush-hour bombing, which struck in the south of the Afghan capital as Gates wrapped up a short visit to assess efforts against an intensifying insurgency.
The bus was reduced to a blackened skeleton of mangled metal, its roof and sides blown out.
“It was a big explosion and sent fire into the sky,” said Akbari Sarwar, a journalist who was on the road when the blast hit. “When I moved in I saw scores of bodies, legs, arms, heads, flesh everywhere,” he told AFP.
Eight Afghan soldiers and eight civilians were killed according to information given to the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), spokesman Brigadier General Carlos Branco told reporters.
Defence ministry spokesman General Mohammad Zahid Azimi said six soldiers and seven civilians were confirmed dead.
Up to 20 civilians may have been killed, many of them children, but information was still being verified, another ministry official said.
Four of the dead were children, health ministry spokesman Abudullah Fahim said. Seventeen people were treated in hospital.
The blast blew a hole into the tarmac of the road in a busy residential area. Hours later the crater had been filled and shopkeepers were repairing damage to their businesses while locals gathered to see the site.
The attack occurred as Gates ended a short trip to Afghanistan in which he held talks with President Hamid Karzai about the rising extremist violence being led by the Taliban, who were in government between 1996 and 2001.
A Taliban suicide attack targeting an ISAF convoy on the first full day of his visit on Tuesday missed the foreign soldiers but wounded 22 Afghan civilians.
The hardline Taliban have been behind a wave of around 140 suicide bombings in Afghanistan this year, which has been the bloodiest of the insurgency.
In the past 12 days, there have been five suicide attacks in and around the city, with Wednesday's the deadliest.
Attacks on buses taking government personnel to work has become a favoured tactic of the Taliban, who have carried out a handful of such attacks this year and been prevented from a few more.
In June a suicide bomber boarded a police bus in the heart of the city and killed 35 people, many of them trainers at the police academy.
That was the deadliest suicide blast in Afghanistan until November 6 when a suicide attack in the northern province of Baghlan killed nearly 80 people, including six parliamentarians and 59 children.
Separately, the US-led coalition, which works alongside ISAF, said it had killed several militants Tuesday in a raid against networks bringing foreign fighters and weapons for Taliban through the southern province of Helmand.
Officials have reported more foreign fighters on the battlefield in the province and Helmand's town of Musa Qala has been in Taliban hands since early February.
Afghan and ISAF soldiers have stepped up operations in Musa Qala district in the past month, a British military spokesman told AFP, downplaying reports that an operation had started to capture the town.
“We haven't entered the town but we have been operating in the area since November 2,” said Lieutenant Colonel Richard Eaton, ISAF's spokesman in Helmand.
Some reports said the soldiers had come within 3.5 kilometres (two miles) of the town, which Eaton did not deny.
