A suicide attack on a supermarket in Kabul's upmarket embassy district on Friday killed at least nine people, three of them foreign women, in the first major Taliban assault on civilians in the capital for nearly a year. A child was also among the dead from Friday's bombing, which shattered a sense of relative calm that had settled over the capital after nearly a year without an attack targeting foreign or Afghan civilians.
Bodies were carried from the blackened hull of the "Finest" supermarket, popular with foreigners and several hundred yards (metres) from the British embassy, as fires broke out among shattered shelves and scattered food. The wounded were led away wailing. President Hamid Karzai condemned the attack as un-Islamic, and put the toll at nine, one higher than police, who said six people were wounded. They declined to give the victims' nationalities.