Today’s New Zealand Tabloid chose instead to go with the ‘Taliban Suicide Bomber’ as the cause of the blast.
The deadly attack on a group of civilians at a wedding in southern Afghanistan was a US-led air strike, a Taliban spokesman claims.
The bomb explosion in the Arghandab district of Kandahar province on Wednesday left about 40 people dead and more than 80 others injured, a Press TV correspondent reported.
Taliban spokesman Qari Yousef Ahmadi said on Thursday that Wednesday night’s blast was not an attack by the group, but a US-led strike.
The spokesman also strongly rejected remarks by Kandahar officials that blamed the Taliban for the explosion.
The Afghan interior ministry announced the wedding was targeted by a car bombing carried out by militants, while NATO officials said the Taliban were behind the attack.
Meanwhile, Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai condemned the Wednesday’s assault, his office said in a statement, ordering an investigation of the incident.
The tragic incident has produced one of the highest death tolls in a single incident in recent months in Afghanistan. Taliban attacks generally cause relatively few casualties, yet the number of incidents caused by US-led forces have resulted in high civilian death tolls.
In September 2009, up to 90 people were killed in a foreign troops’ air strike in northern Afghanistan.
In another attack, a US air strike on a wedding in Kandahar province killed 37 civilians and 26 militants in November 2008.
The United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001 in order to eradicate Taliban militants.