Dozens Killed in Suicide Bombing at Bank in Eastern Afghanistan - New York Times

JALALABAD, Afghanistan — A suicide bomber attacked a crowd of people waiting to collect their pay at a bank here on Saturday, killing 33 and wounding at least 50 in the bloodiest such attack so far this year, officials said. All of the victims were civilians, according to the police.

The blast was one of three separate explosions heard in quick succession in this eastern city around 8 a.m. Saturday, the police said.

Unusually, the Taliban spokesman for eastern Afghanistan, Zabiullah Mujahid, disavowed the bank attack soon after it happened, denying in three different languages on Twitter that the insurgents had been behind it. “We condemn/deny involvement,” Mr. Mujahid wrote.

In 2011, the Taliban claimed responsibility for an even deadlier attack on the same branch of Kabul Bank in Jalalabad, in which seven suicide attackers killed 38 bank customers, also on a payday. Many Afghans collect their salaries directly from banks as a safeguard against the country’s rampant corruption.

Fazel Ahmad Sherzad, the police chief of Nangarhar Province, of which Jalalabad is the capital, put the death toll at 22 and the number of wounded at more than 50. But the head of the provincial health department, Najibullah Kamawal, said that hospitals had already received the bodies of 33 victims, along with more than 100 wounded.

The first of the three blasts in Jalalabad on Saturday morning occurred at a religious shrine and apparently involved a planted bomb, not a suicide attacker; only two people were wounded. Seconds later, according to the police, the suicide bomber at the bank detonated a vest packed with explosives.

A short time later, the police said, they discovered a third bomb in a motorcycle parked in front of a branch of the Central Bank of Afghanistan, and they detonated it under controlled conditions to ensure that no one was hurt.

Khalid Alokozay reported from Jalalabad and Rod Nordland from Kabul, Afghanistan.

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