A car packed with explosives blew up beside the Indian Embassy today, leaving at least a dozen dead in what India’s Foreign Secretary said was an attack on the embassy compound, the second in two years.

The blast killed at least 17 people and wounded 63, according to the Afghan Interior Ministry. Indian authorities said none of the embassy staff had been hurt, but three guards outside — New Delhi said one was from the ITBP — had been wounded.

“The suicide bomber was directed against the embassy,” Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao told reporters in New Delhi. The blast appeared to be similar in pattern to one in July 2008, which American intelligence officials said Pakistan’s intelligence agency had helped to plan. Pakistan denied the charges but promised an investigation. Fifty-four people were killed in that attack, including an Indian defense attaché.

Rao said the blast was similar in size to the 2008 attack but that measures taken since then to secure the embassy had worked effectively in protecting its embassy staff.

The Associated Press cited a Taliban spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahed, as saying that the Taliban had carried out the attack. American commanders believe that the Taliban here are a set of related insurgencies that criss-cross regions and countries, and it was unclear which specific group was responsible.

American officials believe that Jalaluddin Haqqani, the militia commander who battled Soviet troops during the 1980s and has had a long and complicated relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency, was responsible for the July 2008 attack against the Indian Embassy. He is based in the mountains of western Pakistan and has sometimes strained relations with the Pakistani Taliban.

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