KABUL, Afghanistan — In the second major attack in two days, at least 37 people were killed Monday when a suicide bomber rammed his vehicle into a Canadian military convoy in a market in southern Afghanistan, authorities said.
The dead were all Afghan civilians, said Abdul Razeq, the border police chief in Spin Buldak, a town that lies close to Pakistan in Kandahar province. At least 30 other people were injured.
The bombing came a day after the most devastating attack this violence-torn country has seen since the overthrow of the Taliban government at the end of 2001. On Sunday, a suicide bomber blew himself up in a crowd of men and boys who had gathered for a dog-fighting match just outside Kandahar city. The number of dead in that attack has reached 100, Kandahar Gov. Asadullah Khalid said Monday.
Khalid spoke at a memorial service for the likely target of the bombing, Abdul Hakim Jan, a former provincial police chief who made his name as an enemy of the Taliban during the Islamic movement’s rise to power in the 1990s. More recently, Jan headed an anti-Taliban militia outside Kandahar, and Khalid said he had warned Jan that he remained a Taliban target.
Monday’s bombing in Spin Buldak wounded two Canadian soldiers, part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization force operating in Afghanistan. Kandahar province, the cradle of the Taliban movement, has seen heavy fighting in the past two years with the resurgence of the radical movement.
A purported Taliban spokesman, Qari Yousef Ahmadi, said his group was behind the blast.
