[MossadConspiracy]

15 Afghans Are Killed by Car Bomb
By DAVID ROHDE and TAIMOOR SHAH

KABUL, Afghanistan, Aug. 18 — A suicide car bomb attack killed 13 civilians and two Afghan security guards on the outskirts of Kandahar on Saturday morning, Afghan officials said, in one of the deadliest attacks in southern Afghanistan this year.

In Kabul, armed men walked into a restaurant in the affluent neighborhood of Karta Chahar on Saturday afternoon and kidnapped a German aid worker who was eating with her husband, Afghan and American officials said.

The suicide bombing occurred around 9 a.m. when a man rammed a bomb-laden car into a convoy of vehicles driven by Afghan employees of U.S. Protection and Investigations, a private American security company that guards foreign contractors.

The explosion destroyed a security company vehicle and killed two guards, according to the police, but the bulk of its impact was on a van carrying civilians. Two women and a child were among the dead.

“The van passing nearby the incident was completely destroyed, along with the passengers,” Muhammad Nader, a driver who had seen the attack, said in a telephone interview.

Sayed Agha Saqib, the Kandahar Province police chief, said 20 people had been wounded in the attack and taken to hospitals.

The attack was the second in the city in two days. On Friday, a suicide attack killed the top government official from the Zhari district, a rural area west of Kandahar.

In the kidnapping of the German woman, it was not clear who was responsible. The victim works for a Christian aid group. The Taliban have carried out a rash of abductions in Afghanistan in recent weeks. But in a telephone interview, a spokesman for the Taliban, Zabiullah Mujahed, said he did not know whether the Taliban were involved on Saturday. At the same time, there has been a rise in kidnappings and killings by criminal gangs in Kabul.

The Taliban have been holding 19 Korean Christian aid workers, who were abducted last month as they rode on a public bus headed from Kabul to Kandahar. The Taliban killed two men and released two women from among the original 23 Korean hostages.

In that case, a Taliban spokesman, Qari Yousef Ahmadi, said in a telephone interview that negotiations between the Taliban and Korean officials had failed. “We don’t know what the Taliban Shura will decide about the fate of the 19 hostages,” he said.

The Taliban are also still holding a German from a previous kidnapping, in Wardak Province just south of Kabul.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/19/wo...gewanted=print