KABUL (AFP) – Police have arrested three men who were planning a suicide bombing in Afghanistan”s capital Kabul, the government said, a day after a suspected suicide attack was foiled in a provincial capital.
The men were arrested in Logar province near the city on Monday after intelligence reports that they were planning an attack, the interior ministry said on Tuesday. Two others escaped.
Police also seized two pistols, four kilograms (nearly nine pounds) of hashish and a vehicle which may have been intended for use in an attack, said ministry spokesman Yousuf Stanizai.
"Their plan was to perform a suicide attack in Kabul but before they could implement their plan police raided their house. Three were arrested and two fled," he said.
The capital is home to scores of international aid agencies that have been in Afghanistan since the hardline Taliban government was ousted in a US-led operation in 2001.
A spate of suicide bombings in past weeks, most of them largely ineffectual blasts in the volatile south, have been blamed on the Taliban.
The deadliest was on September 28 when a suicide attacker in military uniform drove a motorbike into buses outside a military base in Kabul, killing eight soldiers and a civilian.
Security forces in the eastern province of Khost said Monday they foiled a suicide attack on troops in a US-led coalition force that has been in Afghanistan since 2001, arresting two men in an explosives-filled vehicle rigged up as a bomb.
Southern Afghanistan, where the Taliban movement was born before it took control of most of the country by 1996, is a hotbed of the insurgency.
In an attack on Monday militants ambushed a two-vehicle police convoy in Helmand province, Stanizai said. Two of the attackers were killed and 12 arrested, while three policemen were wounded.
Eighteen police were killed in an ambush in the same province last month.