More than a dozen guests are killed by bomber who infiltrated MP's daughter's wedding in northern Samangan province
A suicide bomber has killed a senior anti-Taliban leader, top security commanders and more than a dozen other guests at a family wedding in northern Afghanistan in one of the bloodiest attacks on military and government officials of the war.
The main target was Ahmad Khan Samangani, an ethnic Uzbek MP who was attending the wedding of his daughter and his nephew in Aybak, the capital of the northern province of Samangan, when the blast happened.
Samangani, who rose to prominence during the fight against Soviet forces and then the country's bitter civil war, had survived a previous attempt on his life five years ago.
The former anti-Taliban commander was welcoming guests to the wedding when the bomber struck, said Khalilluah Andarabi, provincial police chief in Samangan.
"I saw parts of bodies, blood all over the reception," Ahmad Jawed, a guest, said of the blast scene. "Many wounded people were crying for help," he told Reuters news agency.
The Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, said the bomber had killed 17 people and wounded 43. He has ordered a probe into the killing of Samangani, who he said "played a crucial role in forging national unity".
Also among the dead were Police General Sayed Ahmad Sameh, commander for the western region and a relative of Samangani, the Samangan provincial intelligence chief, Mohammad Khan, and the head of the army training centre in nearby Balkh province, Mohammadullah, who like many Afghans uses only one name. Another MP and a former provincial governor were among the wounded.
"To kill so many senior officials with a single attack is rare, particularly in the north. This is a significant attack," said Kate Clark of the Afghanistan Analysts Network.
"To find similar attacks one would have to look back to the killing of General Daud Daud, security commander for the northern zone, in 2011, and a suicide attack on the sugar factory in Baghlan in 2007, in which six parliamentarians and dozens of other civilians were killed, many of them children."
Samangani may have helped seal his own fate by ordering only basic security checks as a mark of respect to his 5,000 guests. "He told the wedding hall staff and his relatives: 'Don't try to check the people too seriously, I don't want my guests to be disturbed,'" said the deputy provincial governor Ghulam Sakhi.
The bride and groom survived the blast, but the ceremony was cancelled, officials said.
The Taliban denied any role in the bombing, Reuters news agency reported. "Ahmad Khan [Samangani] was a former commander of the mujahideen. He was notorious and many people could have had problems with him," a spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, said.
The killing came the day after a provincial governor of women's affairs was killed by a bomb attached to her car in eastern Afghanistan, and the mayor of Shindand district in western Afghanistan was shot dead by unknown gunmen as he left a mosque.
Samangani almost certainly would have created enemies over the years, but he was also a long-term opponent of the insurgent group, which has repeatedly said it considers lawmakers and other government officials legitimate targets.
"After 9/11, commanders in their droves claimed to have been fighting the Taliban. Samangani was one of those whose claim was accurate," said Clark.
"In the late 1990s and early 2000s … he fought the Taliban tenaciously and against the odds."
His killing follows the assassination in recent years of a string of key commanders from the north who once helped lead resistance to the Taliban and might have been candidates to do so again were civil war to return.
As well as the northern police chief killed in 2011, targets have included the governor of Kunduz province Mohammad Omar, and the deputy chief of the national intelligence service, Abdullah Laghmani.
The Taliban might be reluctant to claim a brutal attack on a wedding party, because it violates instructions from the group's leadership to avoid civilian casualties.
• Additional reporting by Mokhtar Amiri