Police kill four Taliban raiders in siege at fortified Kabul hotel

 
Blast damage: security forces outside the hotel’s grenade-damaged steel front gate today
EPA/HEDAYATULLAH AMID
Rashid Razaq27 May 2015

A six-hour gun battle in the diplomatic quarter of Kabul ended with police killing four Taliban militants today.

The raiders had tried to blast their way into a hotel — strongly fortified to protect its many foreign guests — by firing a rocket-propelled grenade at its heavy steel front gate.

Their attack, which began late last night, sparked a siege in a sector of the Afghan capital that is home to many embassies and international firms.

The stand-off ended in a sustained barrage of automatic weapons fire and a series of huge explosions that could be heard all across the Wazir Akbar Khan district.

Kabul’s police chief General Abdul Rahman Rahimi said the gunmen had tried to storm the Rabbani guest house but “all four attackers were killed” before they could do so.

The hotel manager said all guests were in safe rooms and none were hurt. The Taliban put out tweets on a recognised Twitter account claiming responsibility for the attack.

The extremists referred to the target as “belonging to the occupiers”, reiterating its message that foreign installations are specific targets in Kabul.

Afghanistan’s deputy interior minister Mohammad Ayub Salangi said seized weapons included a grenade launcher, three automatic rifles and a hand grenade. Police along with a paramilitary crisis response unit had sealed off the area, which is close to the airport, after the siege began with explosions and sporadic gunfire.

They blocked roads, took positions on roofs and parked armoured carriers in streets around the guest house. Officers smashed lights in the neighbourhood to cover their movements.

For the first five hours gunfire and explosions were sporadic. Then a lull of about an hour ended with dawn volleys of gunfire and huge explosions that sent black smoke clouds into the sky.

The guest house, once known as the Heetal Hotel, was damaged in a December 2009 suicide car bomb attack outside the home of Afghanistan’s former vice-president Ahmad Zia Massoud.

He was the brother of anti-Taliban fighter Ahmad Shah Massoud, who was killed in an al Qaeda suicide bombing two days before the September 11 outrages in 2001. The 2009 attack killed eight people and wounded nearly 40.

The latest raid came amid intensified fighting across Afghanistan after the insurgents began their annual warm-weather offensive a month ago.

A previous Taliban attack on a Kabul guest house this month killed 14 people, among them nine foreigners. Civilian casualties in the first four months of the year, including 974 dead, are 16 per cent up on last year.

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