Several Pakistani workers among 50 killed in Afghan blast

A massive bomb ripped through the downtown area of the troubled Afghan city of Kandahar Tuesday, killing up to 50 people and wounding dozens near hotels and government offices, officials said. The truck bomb ripped through 10 residential buildings, trapping casualties under the rubble as rescue workers frantically tried to dig them out of the debris under the cover of darkness, officials said.
"So far we have 50 killed and 64 wounded and they are all civilians," said General Ghulam Ali Wahdad, police commander for southern Afghanistan, adding that it was impossible to give a breakdown on the identity of the victims. "Police are still busy trying to find bodies from under the rubble," Wahdad told AFP by telephone.
The deaths of 50 people would make it the deadliest explosion in Afghanistan since a suicide car bomber killed more than 60 people, including two senior diplomats, in an attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul on July 7, 2008. Kandahar is the biggest city in southern Afghanistan, where Taliban insurgents fighting the Western-backed government have strongholds.
"It felt like an earthquake. The power went off and there was a huge explosion," said Agha Lalai, a member of the Kandahar provincial council. The bomb went off near a guest house frequented by foreigners, near the Kandahar provincial intelligence headquarters and less than a kilometre from the home of Ahmad Wali Karzai, brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
Wali Karzai, the controversial younger sibling of the president - who was declared narrowly in the lead Tuesday in a neck-and-neck race to win a second term following landmark elections last week - said it was a truck bomb. "It was either a tanker or a truck bomb and the target was a Japanese construction company which is working on road construction," Wali Karzai, who is head of the Kandahar provincial council, told reporters.
"The Japanese were not there but Afghan and Pakistani workers may have been in the building. Doors and windows have blown out and glass broken up to one kilometre (half a mile) diameter and has caused heavy casualties," he said.
Deputy Kandahar police chief Fazel Ahmad Shairzad said: "It was a truck bomb which has caused all these casualties and damage. At this stage we don't know what was the target of the blast. We are investigating." A senior police official said it was a suicide car bomb.