KABUL—The death toll from a bomb attack outside a school in the Afghan capital of Kabul has risen to 68, officials said on May 9, with doctors struggling to care for 165 injured victims and families searching desperately for missing children.
Explosions on the evening of May 8 shook the neighborhood of Dasht-e-Barchi, home to a large community of Shi'ites from the Hazara ethnic minority, which has been targeted in the past by the ISIS teorrist group.
A car bomb was detonated in front of the Sayed Al-Shuhada school and two more bombs exploded when students rushed out in panic.
Officials said most of those killed were schoolgirls. Some families were still searching hospitals for their children.
“The first blast was powerful and happened so close to the children that some of them could not be found,” said an Afghan official, requesting anonymity.
An eyewitness told Reuters that all but seven or eight of the victims were schoolgirls going home after finishing their studies. On May 9, civilians and policemen collected books and school bags strewn across a blood-stained road now busy with shoppers ahead of celebrations for Eid al-Fitr next week.
Bodies were still being collected from morgues as the first burials were conducted in the west of the city. Some families were still searching for missing relatives on May 9, gathering outside hospitals to read names posted on the walls, and checking morgues.
“The entire night, we carried bodies of young girls and boys to a graveyard and prayed for everyone wounded in the attack,” said Mohammed Reza Ali, who has been helping families of the victims at a private hospital.
Security was intensified across Kabul after the attack, but authorities said they would not be able to provide security to all schools, mosques, and other public places.
President Ashraf Ghani on May 8 blamed Taliban terrorists, but a spokesman for the group denied involvement and condemned any attacks on Afghan civilians.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres also condemned the attack and expressed his deepest sympathies to the victims’ families and to the Afghan government and people.
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