At least 10 people were killed and 128 injured in a bombing that targeted an army base amid civilian neighbourhood early Friday, officials said, according to dpa. The bomb, which had been hidden inside a truck, was detonated in Shah Shahid area in western Kabul at 1 am (2030 GMT), Abdul Rahman Rahimi, the Kabul police chief, told dpa at the scene of the incident. The explosion, which was unusually large for Kabul, was heard across the city. Some of the local residents said the explosion caused their windows to shatter a couple kilometers away. Rahimi said the goal of the truck bomb in a residential area was to cause mass casualties. He said many of the victims were women and children. He also said people may have been buried inside their homes destroyed and damaged due to the bombing. The target was the intelligence unit of the Afghan National Army, official said. One local said that the base lies amid the civilian houses in a poor neighbourhood. Tens of houses were damaged in the area. Shops were destroyed, and glass windows shattered, which injured many civilians. Roofs of some of the houses also collapsed. Cars parked by the road were also damaged in the blast aftermath. A building under construction collapsed nearby, in which some of the workers sleeping inside were buried. Police official said they were rescued, but locals contradicted saying some of the people were still under the rubbles. Sediq, 14, who was injured in the bombing, said he was sleeping in his office when the incident took place. "It was a loud boom. Things fell on my legs and I was injured. The bomb was not very far from where I was sleeping," he told dpa. An Afghan man outside Emergency Hospital in Kabul said three of his relatives were injured in the incident. One was still missing in the debris when the house collapsed, he said. Luca Radaelli, the director of Emergency Hospital, told dpa that he had received around 90 patients, many of them with wounds from shattered glass and collapsed houses. "We lost two of them. We are overwhelmed with victims," he said, before rushing to the ward. Fida Mohammad, a doctor at the emergency unit of Ibn-e-Sina Hospital in western Kabul said he had received some 40 injured, including women and children. No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack. On Wednesday, the United Nations, in a half-yearly report said almost 5,000 civilians have been wounded or killed in the first six months of 2015 as a result of the conflict, the highest since they started recording in 2009.
