An “assassination attempt” targeted Pakistan’s top diplomat in Afghanistan, Pakistan prime minister said, as tensions between the neighbouring countries simmer.
The head of mission, Ubaid-ur-Rehman Nizamani, was the target of an attack on its embassy compound, Pakistan’s foreign ministry said on Friday.
“I strongly condemn dastardly assassination attempt on Pakistan Head of Mission, Kabul,” Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said on Twitter.
The attacker failed to harm the Pakistani diplomat, but shot and wounded his security guard, Sharif added. No immediate confirmation on the security guard’s condition was available.
“I demand immediate investigation & action against perpetrators of this heinous act,” Sharif tweeted.
An embassy official said a lone attacker “came behind the cover of houses and started firing”.
“The ambassador and all the other staff are safe, but we are not going outside of the embassy building as a precaution,” he said.
Nizamani arrived in Kabul last month to take up the role at one of the few embassies that had remained operational throughout the period after the Taliban took over the country in August 2021.
A spokesperson for the Taliban’s ministry of foreign affairs denounced the attack.
“Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan strongly condemns the attempted shooting and failed attack on the Pakistani embassy in Kabul,” said spokesperson Abdul Qahar Balkhi on Twitter.
The shooting comes a day after Pakistan’s government demanded Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers prevent terrorist attacks coming from their soil. Pakistani Taliban, who are allied with their namesake’s across the border, claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing earlier in the week in southwestern Pakistan that sent a wave of shock and anger across the nation.
The bombing killed four people and appeared to target police protecting polio workers in the area.
Pakistan blames the Afghan Taliban for not doing enough to control armed fighters sheltering in their country who stage attacks across the border. The Taliban seized power last year in Kabul as the last US and NATO troops withdrew from Afghanistan.
A prominent politician and strongman, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, also escaped unhurt a separate attack on the same day in Kabul, his office said in a statement. Security guards killed the two attackers as they tried to enter a mosque where Hekmatyar and his supporters had gathered for Friday prayers, the statement said.
Hekmatyar later said in a video message that the attackers were suicide bombers disguised in women’s burqas who intended to blow him up.
“I assure my countrymen, a failed attempt happened here by those who have done it many times but have failed,” Hekmatyar said, adding it was not yet clear who was behind the attack.
“It cannot lower our morale or our resistance… we will stand with our nation,” he said.
No one immediately claimed responsibility for either of the attacks in Kabul.
Hekmatyar, who battled US forces after the 2001 invasion and nursed a bitter rivalry with other Afghan factions, agreed to lay down arms in 2017 and join a peace deal with former President Ashraf Ghani.
Hekmatyar stayed in Kabul after the Taliban took power in last year, even as Ghani and other former leaders fled.
The former strongman founded Hezb-i-Islami in the mid-1970s as one of the main mujahideen groups fighting the Soviets in the 1980s. He then took part in the civil war that erupted after their withdrawal, clashing with the so-called Northern Alliance, before the Taliban first seized power in the late 1990s.
Several bombing and shooting attacks have taken place in Afghanistan in recent months, some of which have been claimed by the Islamic State group. A blast at a religious school on Wednesday in northern Afghanistan killed at least 15 people.
