Death toll from Kabul blast rises to 21

By Islamuddin Sajid

ISLAMABAD (AA) – The death toll from Wednesday's Kabul explosion 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 that occurred inside a mosque in Afghanistan’s capital city.

"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.

According to Taliban officials, the suicide bomber who detonated explosives hidden in an artificial plastic limb targeted Haqqani inside his seminary.

So far, no group has claimed responsibility for the Kabul attack but recently the Daesh/ISIS terrorist organization targeted the Taliban's religious seminaries and mosques in Kabul and other parts of the country.