Kabul - A suicide car bomb blew up Tuesday outside a US military base near Kabul during a visit by US Vice President Dick Cheney, killing more than 15 people but not harming the vice president, officials said.
"I can confirm there was an explosion near Bagram airfield at 10 a.m. [0530 GMT]," US forces spokesman Master Sergeant Richard Simonsen told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.
"Initial reports indicate there were some injuries, but it did not impact on the vice president," he said.
Colonel Tom Collins, a spokesman for the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, said the explosion was caused by a suicide car bomber at the gate of the primary US military base in
Afghanistan.
Collins said there were around 13 casualties and "I can confirm that two of them are dead."
An Interior Ministry spokesman said that over 15 people were killed but could not elaborate on how many foreign or Afghan nationals were affected.
A purported spokesman for the Taliban, Qari Mohammad Yousef Ahmadi, told dpa by phone from an undisclosed location that his group was responsible for the explosion.
Ahmadi said more than 20 people were killed and another 30 were injured in the attack, the majority of them US soldiers.
He said the attack was carried out by an Afghan national named Abdul Rahim from Logar province.
Hours prior to the attack, Cheney met with US soldiers stationed at the base and had breakfast with them. He was expected to meet Afghan President Hamid Karzai later in the day.
Cheney arrived Monday evening from Islamabad, where he held talks with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf about the security situation in Afghanistan.
In a second suicide bombing Tuesday, a bomber detonated explosives strapped to his body outside a government office in Kandahar, the capital of the southern province of the same name, killing a girl and himself and wounding two other people, local police said.
Esmatullah Alizai, the provincial police chief, told dpa that the attack occurred about 9:15 a.m. as the bomber tried to gain entry nto the national security directorate department in downtown
Kandahar.
"He was recognized before he could enter the building and detonated himself," Alizai said.
Tuesday's attacks came a day after another suicide bomber killed himself and a police officer in the south-eastern province of Khost.
The attack took place in Khost city when officers stopped the man outside a police station.
The Taliban has intensified its operations in Afghanistan after a lull during the harsh Afghan winter. The violence so far this year has killed about 400 people, mostly insurgents.
