A suicide bombing on Wednesday killed at least 34 people, many of them students, and left dozens more injured at a school in a Shiite area of Kabul, officials said.
A member of ISIS detonated his device in the private Mawoud educational centre in the Dasht-e-Barchi area of the Afghan capital – a largely Shia Hazara area.
Photographs showed a devastated classroom with its roof blown away. At least 15 ambulances attended the scene and local trauma hospitals were overwhelmed by the influx of students in need of emergency care.
A spokesman for Afghanistan’s interior ministry said it expects the death toll to continue to climb. The health ministry said at least 67 people were injured in the attack.
The casualties were mainly students under the age of 18. Authorities initially said 48 people had been killed, but revised the number to 34 on Thursday morning.
Afghan security forces in the area responded to the blast with gunfire, assuming there were more attackers, witnesses reported.
Afghan President Ashraf Ghani condemned the suicide bombing. The strongly worded statement by President Ashraf Ghani denounced the “terrorist bombing” on Wednesday, and ordered relevant authorities to investigate how the attack happened.
Mr Ghani said that in “this terrorist bombing once again, the terrorists martyred and wounded the innocent” – students attending a training class in a Shiite neighbourhood of Kabul.
He added that “by targeting educational and cultural centres, terrorists have clearly shown they are against all those Islamic principles (that strive) for both men and women to learn and study”.
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