At a ceremony for journalists in Mazar-i-Sharif, a city in northern Afghanistan, a security guard was killed, and five Afghan journalists and three children were injured. That’s what the police say.
When children began to sing the national anthem after the speech of a senior Taliban official, “I heard a strong explosion,” said a local journalist, Atif Arian, who was at the scene and was injured in the ear. Balkh province police spokesman Mohammad Asif Waziri said a security guard was killed, and five journalists and three children were injured.
“It was chaos when the explosion sounded. Everyone tried to escape, afraid the building would collapse,” Arian said. According to the journalist, several of his colleagues were seriously injured.
The meeting occurred in a cultural centre in honour of National Journalists Day. Afghan journalists have often been targeted since the Taliban’s return to power in August 2021. Many of these attacks are claimed by the terrorist group IS.
In the same city two days ago, the governor of Balkh, Mohammad Dawood Muzammil, was killed in an explosion. It is the top Taliban official killed since the Taliban returned to power in August 2021.
