A guard was killed and eight people were injured – five Afghan journalists and three children – in an attack on Saturday (11) in Mazar-i-Sharif, northern Afghanistan, during a ceremony honoring media professionals, police said.
Balkh police spokesman Mohammad Asif Waziri said the attack killed the security guard at the building where a meeting organized by a cultural center to celebrate the National Day of Journalists was taking place.
After a speech by an official of the Taliban regime, a group of children sang the national anthem and there was a “very strong explosion”, the journalist, Atif Arian, who was injured, told AFP.
“When the explosion happened, there was chaos, everyone was trying to flee because they feared the building would collapse”, said Arian, before reporting that some colleagues were “seriously injured”.
Afghan journalists were frequent targets of attacks, some of them claimed by the extremist group Islamic State (IS), before the Taliban’s return to power in August 2021.
The blast came two days after the governor of Balkh, of which Mazar-i-Sharif is the capital, was killed in a suicide bombing claimed by IS.
Violence in Afghanistan has dropped considerably since the Taliban’s return to power, but the situation has deteriorated since last year, when IS claimed responsibility for several deadly attacks.