Suicide motorbike driver kills 20 and wounds 30 at Afghan wrestling match

KABUL, Afghanistan -- Spectators were cheering the final moments of a wrestling match at a holiday fair when a motorbike weaved into the crowd -- and exploded in a searing fireball.

"It was like doomsday," said Abdul Samad, who was in the crowd Monday at the border town of Spinboldak. "The motorcycle went up into the air in flames."

The attacker, with explosives strapped to his body, killed 20 people and wounded at least 30. It was the third deadly bombing in just over 24 hours in the former Taliban stronghold of Kandahar province, and the bloodiest yet in a recent wave of suicide assaults.

Samad said he fled in a stampede of terrified spectators who had gathered at the fair to celebrate the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha. But he returned to help pull out the dead and injured, then escorted a wounded wrestler across the border to a hospital in Chaman, Pakistan.

"Some did not have their hands; others had their legs missing," he said.

Some two dozen suicide bombings have wracked Afghanistan over the past four months -- a relatively new tactic for militants here that has stoked fears of an escalating siege of bloody attacks like those in Iraq.

President Hamid Karzai warned earlier Monday that Afghanistan could again become a staging post for terrorist strikes in Europe and America if international support wavers.

The blast burned the hair, beard and left arm of Najamuddin, a 24-year-old wrestler who uses only one name. He also broke his right hand when he was blown to the ground.

"The explosion tossed me into the air and threw me back. When I got up, I saw people lying in blood," Najamuddin said from his bed in the Chaman hospital.

Kandahar Gov. Asadullah Khalid put the toll at 20 dead and at least 30 wounded. Rafiq Tarin, a Pakistani official in Chaman, said more than 30 people were treated at the hospital there, including many in critical condition.

Khalid repeated an Afghan government claim that suicide attackers are being trained in Pakistan's frontier region, a tribal area where Taliban loyalists and al-Qaida militants are thought to be hiding.

Pakistan's government says it is trying to root out Islamic extremists. But officials on both sides acknowledge it is relatively easy for militants to cross back and forth along the mountainous border between the two countries.

The motorbike assault came just hours after a bomb targeted a truck convoy of Afghan soldiers in Kandahar city, killing four people and wounding 16. On Sunday, a suicide car bomber in that southern provincial capital killed a senior Canadian diplomat and two Afghan civilians.

Qari Mohammed Yusaf, who claims to speak for the Taliban, although his exact ties to the group's leadership are unclear, said its fighters had planted the bomb that struck the Afghan army convoy in Kandahar city, but denied involvement in the Spinboldak attack.

"The Taliban didn't do this suicide attack. We are targeting coalition and government forces but we are not targeting civilians," he said in a phone call from an undisclosed location to an Associated Press reporter in Afghanistan.

Karzai, talking to reporters in Kabul about a foreign donors' conference in London this month, urged the international community not to turn its back on fighting terrorism in his country four years after a U.S.-led military offensive drove the Taliban from power for harboring Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida training camps.

Assistance will be needed for a long time, he said.

"We are in a joint struggle against terrorism, for us and for the international community," Karzai said. "If you don't defend yourself here, you will have to defend yourself back home, in European capitals and Americans' capitals."

In a talk with the AP last week, Karzai had played down the threat of terrorism in Afghanistan, although he said he expected suicide attacks to continue for a long time.

Violence in southern and eastern Afghanistan spiked last year, leaving about 1,600 people dead, the most since U.S.-led forces ousted the Taliban in late 2001, after the Sept. 11 terror attacks on America.

Fighting normally eases during the winter, when snow blankets the region, but the past few weeks have seen a string of suicide bombings and other attacks.

A U.S. military spokesman, Col. James Yonts, said insurgents are making fewer direct assaults on military forces and moving to guerrilla-style attacks on less-protected targets.

"The enemy knows he cannot defeat us militarily," Yonts said. "He is shifting his tactics to soft targets. He will strike without warning and he will strike, as we have seen, unfortunately against civilians."

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Associated Press writers Noor Khan in Asadabad and Amir Shah in Kabul, Afghanistan, and Naimatullah Sarhadi in Chaman, Pakistan, contributed to this report.