KUNDUZ, Afghanistan — Investigators have found evidence that a deadly suicide bombing attack against the Indian Embassy in Kabul this week was planned with the help of a foreign intelligence agency, a spokesman for Afghanistan’s president said Tuesday.
Humayun Hamidzada, chief spokesman for President Hamid Karzai, pointedly avoided direct references to Pakistan during a news conference but hinted that the scale and complexity of the strike against the embassy bore the markings of previous attacks linked to Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency.
“The sophistication of this attack and the kind of material that was used, the specific targeting, everything has the hallmarks of a particular agency that has conducted similar attacks inside Afghanistan. We have sufficient evidence to say that,” Hamidzada said. “The project was designed outside Afghanistan. It was exported to Afghanistan.”
He offered no further specifics about the evidence of foreign involvement.
Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani told The Associated Press on Tuesday that his government was not involved in the attack.
Gilani said that Pakistan is seeking to stabilize a region fractured by conflict and that it had no interest in undermining Afghanistan’s security.
The attack against the Indian Embassy killed at least 41 people and wounded 150 others, making it one of the deadliest in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban in late 2001.
The U.S. military, worried about increasing insurgent attacks in Afghanistan, said Tuesday it is sending extra air power there by shifting an aircraft carrier away from the Iraq war.
Defense officials said Tuesday that the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln was moved out of the Persian Gulf and to the Gulf of Oman, shortening the time that the carrier’s strike planes must fly to support combat in Afghanistan.
They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record.
One official said the decision reflects both the worsened state of the fight in Afghanistan but improvements in Iraq as well. Since violence is down in Iraq, U.S. defense leadership believes it is possible to focus some air capabilities away from Iraq and more on Afghanistan.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
