Bomb attack in Afghan city kills eight

Press, 25 January 1988, Page 6

Bomb attack in Afghan city kills eight

NZPA-Reuter Islamabad Eight people were killed and 47 injured in a bomb attack on Saturday (New Zealand time) in the Afghan city of Jalalabad at the funeral of a Pakistani secessionist leader, Abdul Ghaffar Khan, official Kabul Radio said.

A spokesman for the Pakistani Awami National Party, which organised the funeral procession across the Khyber Pass to Jalalabad, put the death toll at 16 — 12 Pakistanis and four Afghans. He said a man injured in the blasts died in a Peshawar hospital yesterday.

Western correspondents at the scene had counted at least six bodies.

The spokesman said 36 Pakistanis were also injured. Radio Kabul, monitored in Islamabad, blamed “criminal extremists”, its usual term for Westernbacked rebels, describing the attack as un-Islamic and unforgivable. In Peshawar, Ghaffar Khan’s son and Pakistan’s best-known Left-wing politician, Khan Abdul Wali Khan, blamed United States policies. Afghan

rebel leaders, however, said the Soviet KGB security police were responsible. Addressing more than 3000 mourners for the victims in Peshawar, Wali Khan said Washington’s self-interested policies in the sub-continent were to blame and that the United States was pushing Pakistan towards war.

His Awami National Party strongly opposes Pakistan’s support for the

Afghan anti-communist guerrillas, accusing Islamabad of acting as a surrogate for United States interests. The Pakistan-based rebels denied responsibility for the blasts, pointing out in a joint statement that all fighters in the region had been ordered to allow the funeral cortege to pass unharmed from Peshawar to Jalalabad and back.

“We express our strong

condemnation of this inhuman tragedy committed by the K.G.B. and categorically reject any association with it,” they said.

One of the seven guerrilla parties, Hezb-i-Islami (Hekmatyar), said in a separate statement that the attack had been intended to “muddy” relations between Pakistan and the three million Afghan refugees and guerrillas there.