KABUL — Afghan intelligence agents on Sunday gunned down a man in a sport utility vehicle that officials said had been packed with explosives, foiling what they described as an attempt to set off a massive explosion in a neighborhood of narrow streets lined with foreign embassies.
Around the same time, Taliban suicide attackers set off three separate car bombs in a pair of provinces near the capital. But they inflicted minimal damage, according to officials, and the toll from the Sunday violence was low — apart from the two attackers and one suspect killed, two security guards and a police officer were slain and five other people wounded, including one attacker who managed to flee.
Zabiullah Mujahid, a spokesman for the Taliban, said the insurgents were behind the three successful bombings. But he disavowed knowledge of the attempt in Kabul, saying Taliban commanders in the city had no plans to launch an attack on Sunday.
While it is not unusual for the Taliban to deny having a hand in a failed attack, much about the attempted bombing Sunday remained murky, with officials hailing Afghan security forces for acting quickly but offering only the barest details about how the man said to be a bomber was spotted.
Gen. Mohammed Ayoub Salangi, the police chief of Kabul, said the suspect was in a Toyota sport utility vehicle and was trying to pass through a checkpoint when he was recognized by agents from the country’s intelligence service, the National Directorate of Security.
The man “was gunned down,” General Salangi said. The agents had to act quickly, he added, saying that there was no time to inspect the vehicle or question the suspect because that would have given him the chance to detonate the explosives.
General Salangi, who in an earlier statement said there were two men in the car, did not say how or why the agents recognized the man. But he added that the car bomb was quickly defused by experts from the Security Directorate and carted away.
The bombing attempt, in the Wazir Akbar Khan neighborhood, did briefly cause some of the embassies to lock down the streets on which they are located and on which they control security. The spot were the man was shot were was less than a mile from the U.S. Embassy and the headquarters of the American-led coalition, neither of which offered any comment.
Earlier in the day, in Jalalabad, a city in eastern Afghanistan, a single bomber in a Toyota Corolla directly targeted the Security Directorate, officials said, detonating his explosive-laden vehicle outside a building used by the spy agency. Two guards were killed and a third was wounded, said Hazrat Mohammad Mashraqiwal, a police spokesman in Jalalabad.
Later on Sunday, a pair of bombers in another car laden with explosives tried to enter the district governor’s compound in Baraki Barak district of Logar Province, south of Kabul. But they were stopped by police officers guarding the compound, prompting one man to jump and make a run for it and the other to set off the car bomb, said Abdul Rahim Amin, the governor.
One police officer was wounded in the attack, along with the man who fled.
Earlier in Logar, around dawn, a minivan packed with explosives was set off at a police post near the provincial capital, Pul-e-Alam. One police officer was killed and two others wounded, an official said.
Sharifullah Sahak contributed reporting.
Insurgents Launch 4 Attacks in Afghanistan
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Insurgents Launch 4 Attacks in Afghanistan
