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LATE NEWS: 2 wounded in suicide attack near US base

KABUL: A suicide car bomber blew himself up near a convoy at the biggest US base in Afghanistan on Monday, wounding two children, as the number of coalition soldiers killed in the past week rose to seven.

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the suicide blast near the Bagram Air Base north of Kabul, saying that the attacker was acting in revenge for the killing of two of his brothers in a traffic accident involving a US military vehicle. The latest violence comes amid some of the worst insurgency-linked bloodshed in Afghanistan since the Taliban regime was ousted in late 2001 by a coalition led by the United States. Police said a station wagon laden with explosives had veered towards a coalition convoy less than a kilometre outside the gate of the Bagram base and exploded. The body of the suicide bomber was scattered about the blast site in chunks next to the mangled wreck of the vehicle that carried the bomb. “Two children were wounded,” said Yousuf Stanizai, spokesman for the Interior Ministry. A coalition spokesman at Bagram, about 50 kilometres north of Kabul, confirmed that there had been a bombing outside the gate but could not immediately confirm if it was a suicide blast. There were no coalition casualties, Lieutenant Colonel Paul Fitzpatrick said. A purported Taliban spokesman, Mohammad Hanif, said that the blast was carried out by an Afghan man who had “sworn to take revenge from Americans since his two brothers were killed in the American accident”. He was referring to a May 29 crash in which a US military truck from Bagram lost control after a brake failure and ploughed into a dozen civilian cars at the northern entrance of the city. Several Afghans were killed.

The crash set off a day of rioting that was the worst violence the capital had seen since the Taliban were toppled. At the end of the day, about 20 people were dead. The attacker used “Taliban facilities” to carry out the attack, Hanif said by satellite telephone from an undisclosed location. The sprawling Bagram base is home to thousands of troops and many of the warplanes that the military dispatches for operations across the country. Meanwhile, the latest coalition fatality came during combat operations in eastern Afghanistan, the coalition said on Monday. The soldier, whose nationality was not released, died from wounds sustained in the battle in Kunar province bordering Pakistan on Sunday. Agencies

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