Death toll from Kabul blast rises to 21

ISLAMABAD (AA) – The death toll from Wednesday’s explosion in a Kabul mosque rose to 21, an Afghan official said on Thursday.

In a statement, Kabul police spokesman Khalid Zadran said that 21 people were killed and 33 others wounded in the explosion.

“The bomb explosion occurred at the Abu Bakr al Sadiq Mosque when a large number of people were performing evening prayers,” Zadran said.

Zabihullah Mujahid, the spokesman for Afghanistan’s interim administration, condemned the explosion and said the perpetrators would be brought to justice soon.

In videos posted on Twitter following the blast, blood was seen throughout the main prayer hall of the mosque, which is adjacent to an Islamic seminary in the Khairkhana Kotal neighborhood.

The mosque’s prayer leader Maulvi Amir Mohammad Kabuli, a renowned Afghan scholar and preacher of Sufi Islam, was targeted, and the majority of those killed and wounded were seminary students, according to the Afghan Islamic Press.

This was the second explosion in Kabul in a week.

Earlier, a prominent religious scholar Sheikh Rahimullah Haqqani was targeted in a suicide bombing in Kabul last week.