Updated on
Summary
At least 40 people were killed and 77 injured by a suicide bomb attack on a wedding party in insurgency-plagued southern Afghanistan, a police official said on Thursday.A suicide bomber went inside the party where hundreds of people were sitting and blew himself up, the official said of Wednesday night's blast in Arghandab district, north of Kandahar, where foreign troops are focussing on a push in coming months to whittle out the Taliban. Many of the wounded were taken to a hospital in Kandahar. While the Taliban are responsible for most civilian deaths in the country, foreign forces have killed hundreds of civilians, either mistaking them for insurgents or as a result of misdirected air strikes. Rural wedding parties in Afghanistan can often be raucous affairs with large gatherings of people and frequently accompanied by celebratory gunfire. Several have mistakenly been attacked in the past by foreign forces. A favoured tactic is improvised explosive devices (IEDs) or suicide attacks on foreign or Afghan forces, but pro-government sympathisers are also targeted and the insurgency used as a cover to settle old score
