By Mohammad Yunus Yawar
KABUL (Reuters) – Over a dozen Chinese citizens were wounded, five of them seriously, in a gun and bomb attack on a hotel in downtown Kabul, a Chinese businessman in the Afghan capital said on Tuesday, as local authorities kept the premises sealed.
The Taliban-run Afghan administration is yet to provide official details of the attack on Monday, but said no foreigners were killed. Islamic State claimed responsibility.
At the time of the attack, over 30 Chinese citizens were in the hotel, Yu Ming Hui, the head of the China Town business complex in Kabul and a leading Chinese businessman in Afghanistan, told Reuters.
“Five of them are in the ICU in Emergency Hospital, around 13 to 14 are superficially wounded,” he said, adding that the rest had left the hotel to stay elsewhere.
China’s foreign ministry said in a briefing five Chinese citizens had been injured.
A guard posted outside the hotel told Reuters on condition of anonymity that the site was sealed off.
“The investigation is still going on, no one is allowed to go inside,” he said.
An eyewitness at a restaurant near the hotel told Reuters that there had been some raids and arrests in the area about an hour before the first explosion was heard.
The security guard, who was present in the area when the first blast happened, said initial details showed the assailants managed to book a room inside the hotel prior to the attack, and hence managed to get explosives inside beforehand.
The Islamic State statement also mentioned previously-planted explosives.
A spokesman for the Taliban-run administration said on Monday that three assailants had been killed. Emergency Hospital, located near the hotel, said it had received three dead bodies and 18 injured, but declined to identify casualties for privacy reasons.
The Islamic State in its claim identified two attackers and said it had killed or wounded 30 security force members and Chinese citizens.
The incident is the first attack on Chinese interests in Afghanistan since the Taliban took power in the country last year.
The Taliban-run administration has struggled to stabilise the security situation even after the departure of U.S.-led foreign forces last year ended two decades of war in Afghanistan.
Islamic State radicals have launched multiple attacks in Kabul, including on the Russian and Pakistani embassies in recent months.
(Writing by Gibran Peshimam; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)
