35 killed in Kabul explosions

A government statement said, “We share the grief of the brotherly people of the Afghanistan over this cowardly act against innocent civilians”.

On Saturday, Nato-led coalition forces confirmed that one worldwide service member and eight Afghan contractors were killed in the attack on Camp Integrity, a base used by US special forces near the main airport.

The attack on Camp Integrity on Friday night and two massive bombings in the city earlier in the day call into question Afghan President Ashraf Ghani’s ability to tamp down the violent insurgency that is roiling the country despite his administration’s focus on making peace with the Taliban.

The suicide bomber ignited his explosives at the police academy’s front gate where students had queued to enter the training facility, said an Afghan police official in the police hospital who didn’t want to be named.

The Taliban said they were also behind the academy attack in which a person dressed in police uniform mingled with cadets returning from their weekend break. It was unknown how the attackers smuggled a large amount of explosives into the heavily guarded city.

The Afghan intelligence agency announced over a week ago that Mullah Mohammad Omar, the reclusive one-eyed founder and leader of the Taliban, had been dead for more than two years.

A Taliban spokesman claimed responsibility for the attack on the police academy in Kabul.

The Taliban are in the midst of a leadership dispute following last week’s appointment of Mullah Akhtar Mansour as new leader.

The carnage underscores the volatile security situation in Afghanistan amid a faltering peace process with the Taliban as Afghan forces face their first summer fighting season without full North Atlantic Treaty Organisation support.

Zabihullah Mujahid, a spokesman for the Taliban – who were toppled from power in the 2001 US invasion of Afghanistan – told AFP the insurgent group was behind the attack.

The force of the explosion just after midnight created an enormous crater in the road, around 10 metres (30 feet) deep, and destroyed the boundary wall of the base, although no military casualties were reported. At least 36 people were killed and hundreds wounded in the attacks in Kabul on Friday.

The health ministry said the number of wounded could run even higher, with most suffering injuries from flying glass.

Soldiers erected a security cordon around the military base close to Shah Shaheed, a largely middle-class civilian residential area with no major foreign presence. The president’s deputy spokesperson Zafar Hashemi said about 40 of the wounded were hospitalised.