A car bomb exploded near a NATO convoy just outside a US military base in Kabul early Friday, wounding civilian contractors, foreign soldiers and Afghan bystanders, the NATO-led force and local police said. The head of criminal investigations for Kabul police, Abdul Ghafar Sayedzada, said a suicide bomber drove his car into a convoy of civilian vehicles just outside Camp Phoenix, a large US military base near the Afghan capital's airport. He said three to four foreign casualties had been taken from the scene by Western troops, but he could give no details of the extent of their injuries. In a text message to Reuters, Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said that his group was responsible for the attack. The NATO-led force confirmed the attack in a statement. It said none of its soldiers was killed. It gave no numbers of the wounded casualties and did not identify the nationalities of the foreign troops or contractors. A damaged white civilian vehicle could be seen at the debris-strewn blast site on a main road about 100 metres (yards) from Camp Phoenix on Jalalabad road. Witnesses said a second civilian vehicle destroyed in the blast had been removed, while US troops in armoured vehicles blocked off the site. “We were having breakfast when we heard a huge bang. All the glass was shattered,” said Abdul Jamil, a worker at a petrol station across the street from the site.
