A suicide bomber on a motorcycle struck a street in central Kabul this morning. In a “double-tap” strike, a second larger bomb exploded as emergency workers and journalists rushed in. The current estimated death toll is above thirty persons.
The second suicide bomber was dressed as a news photographer. Nine journalists have been killed. Seven other journalists were injured.
Saaed Kamali Dehghan at the Guardian has bios for some of the nine.
Photographs from Shah Mari, with Agence France-Presse, are available at the Atlantic and NBC.
Twin bombings in Kabul on Monday killed at least 25 people, including nine journalists. It was the deadliest single attack involving journalists in Afghanistan since at least 2002, and one of the most lethal ever worldwide, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
A 10th journalist, from the BBC’s Afghan service, was shot and killed in a separate attack on Monday outside Kabul.
The bombings were the latest spasm of a conflict that began more than a decade and a half ago and shows no sign of ebbing.
In a two-stage attack, bombers detonated a first device during the morning rush and a second roughly 40 minutes later, killing emergency workers and journalists who had by then reached the site, officials said.
Today Was the Deadliest for Journalists in Afghanistan Since at Least 2002, Mujib Mashal and Fahim Abed, New York Times
Radio Free Afghanistan journalist Abadullah Hananzai was furious on April 25 when he learned that a former colleague had been gunned down at a market in Kandahar in an apparent targeted killing.
"The murder of my former colleague at Kabul News, a great journalist named Abdul Manan Arghand, has greatly upset me," Hananzai wrote in Pashto on his Facebook page. "Arghand is now a martyr for freedom of speech."
It would be Hananzai's last public Facebook post.
Dark Day for Reporters as 9 Killed in Afghan Bombing, Associated Press
Two years before his death, Shah Marai, the chief Kabul-based photographer for the French news agency Agence France-Presse, pondered the hopelessness that he said had descended on his native country of Afghanistan.
"The signs of war have all but disappeared," Marai wrote in the 2016 blog post. "But there is no more hope."
"I don’t dare to take my children for a walk. I have five and they spend their time cooped up inside the house. Every morning as I go to the office and every evening when I return home, all I think of are cars that can be booby-trapped, or of suicide bombers coming out of a crowd," he wrote.
Marai was one of at least nine journalists killed in Afghanistan on April 30, in what has turned into the deadliest single day for reporters in the war-torn country since the 2001 U.S. invasion. The killings bring the death toll among reporters working in the country since 1994 to at least 44, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Slain Young Journalists Saw RFE/RL As A Way To Make Afghanistan A Better Place, Mike Eckel, Radio Free Europe