Woman bomber kills 14 in Kabul

ROD NORDLAND & SANGAR RAHIMI

A suicide bomber killed 14 people on Tuesday including 10 foreigners, most of whom worked as flight crew members under contract with the US government, officials said. The attack brought to at least 28 the number of deaths attributed to unrest sweeping the Muslim world as a result of an amateurish video parodying the Prophet Muhammad.

A spokesman for an Afghan insurgent group, Hezb-i-Islami, claimed responsibility for the bombing and said it was carried out by an 18-year-old woman.

"We claim credit for the attack by a martyrdom-seeking mujahid, an 18-year-old girl named Fatima, from Kabul, and the attack has been conducted in response to the film insulting the Prophet Muhammad and Islam," said Zubir Siddiqi, the spokesman, reached by telephone.

The deaths in Kabul on Tuesday were the first here so far connected to the video, and came as the authorities cracked down on attempted street demonstrations and asked Internet providers to block sites hosting a clip of the film, posted under the name Innocence of Muslims, shutting down access to Google, YouTube and Gmail in the process.

In the attack on Tuesday, the suicide bomber drove a car full of explosives head-on into a minibus carrying foreign workers on the Airport Road, killing all 12 people aboard and two people on the road, according to the police.

US officials confirmed that at least eight had been employed by a South African aviation charter company, ACS/Balmoral, working under contract for USAID as pilots and crew flying planes in what is colloquially known as "Embassy Air" to provincial capitals in Afghanistan. A spokeswoman for ACS/Balmoral, Candice Teubes, said all eight were believed to be South African citizens.

Meanwhile, protests raged across Indonesia, Thailand and Pakistan. In Pakistan, protesters broke through a barricade outside the US consulate in in Peshawar.

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