KABUL — Amid screams of “Suicide bomber! Suicide bomber!” an insurgent detonated his vest of explosives Saturday, killing at least four people at a sports field in northwestern Afghanistan.
It was the latest in a spate of attacks that have hit nearly every corner of the country in recent weeks. A roadside bomb also killed nine people Saturday near the eastern city of Khost.
The suicide bomber struck a game of buzkashi, a traditional Afghan sport in which players on horseback wrangle for a headless goat carcass, said Abdul Haq Shafiq, governor of Faryab province.
“The people and the police became suspicious of the bomber,” Shafiq said. “People started running. Everyone was scared. The people called out, ‘Suicide bomber! Suicide bomber!’ and then the bomber blew himself up.”
Besides the dead, 19 people were wounded, Shafiq said. About 2,000 people were at the event when the blast occurred.
Also, the Afghan intelligence service announced the arrests of a Pakistani boy and two teenagers — one from Afghanistan and the other from Pakistan — who claimed they had been coerced into becoming would-be suicide bombers.
All three appeared at a news conference and recounted stories of how militants forced them into becoming suicide attackers for the insurgency.
Akhtar Nawaz, 14, from South Waziristan in Pakistan, said six men in a vehicle grabbed him off the street while he was walking home from school.
“They told me that I had to carry out a suicide attack,” Nawaz told reporters. “I told them I didn’t want to, but they forced me to go with them.”
He said he was driven to Khost and shown the target but decided not to go through with the attack at the last minute, turning himself in to Afghan security forces instead. He remains in custody.
