The special forces are still fighting the attackers, who entered the hotel at 9 pm on Saturday and began firing randomly.
Four gunmen stormed the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul’s Bagh-e-Bala area on Saturday night. Interior Ministry spokesperson Nasrat Rahimi said that several people have been killed and at least six were wounded, Reuters reported. However, there is no official toll yet.
The Afghan special forces have killed two of the four attackers, BBC reported. But local media reports said only one attacker has been killed. No group has claimed responsibility for the attack that began at 9 pm local time (10 pm IST).
After a break of about two hours, a loud explosion and the sound of rapid gunfire were heard around 4 am, TOLOnews reported. It quoted an unidentified survivor as saying that the attackers began randomly firing on the people in the hotel.
The attack came days after the United States embassy warned of possible attacks on hotels in the city. Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani had said in an interview aired last week that the country’s National Army and the government would collapse in six months without the support of the United States.
The president admitted that his government would not have the money to maintain the Army if the US pulled its support. American taxpayers every year pay more than $4 billion (Rs 25,543 crore), which is 90% of Afghanistan’s defence budget. It has spent another $30 billion (Rs 1.91 lakh crore) to rebuild the country.
The Afghan president said that the country was under siege from the Taliban, which had succeeded in sowing doubts in the mind of the people about the government by terrorising them. The terror groups in the country, he said, were running “factories producing suicide bombers”.
