Kabul  (TIP): A suicide bombing outside the Russian Embassy in Kabul killed two members of the embassy staff and four others in a rare attack on a foreign diplomatic mission in Afghanistan on Sept 4. The blast went off at the entrance to the embassy’s consular section, where Afghans were waiting for news about their visas, according to the Russian Foreign Ministry and the state news agency. A Russian diplomat had emerged from the building to call out the names of candidates for visas, when the explosion occurred, it said.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the blast, the latest in a series of bombings and other attacks since the Taliban seized power a year ago, deposing a Western-backed government and capping their 20-year insurgency. Monday’s bombing, however, appeared to the first to target a foreign diplomatic mission in Kabul since the Taliban takeover. It was not immediately clear why militants targeted the Russian Embassy in particular. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called the explosion “a terrorist act, absolutely unacceptable”.— Agencies