Friday prayers were just going on, which is the busiest time of the week in the mosque.
Dozens of people have died after a bomb exploded at a mosque in Kandahar in southern Afghanistan.
Information on the number of victims of the explosion varies. News agency AFP and Al-Jazeeran there were at least 32 dead and 40-50 injured. Reuters said there were at least 35 dead and 68 wounded.
The bomb exploded in downtown Kandahar, according to al-Jazeera, the city’s largest Shiite mosque. Two eyewitnesses interviewed by AFP say they heard a total of three explosions, one of which, according to another eyewitness, occurred at the mosque door.
At the time of the event there were ongoing Friday prayers in the mosque during the busiest time of the week.
“We are saddened by the explosion at the Shiite Mosque in Kandahar, where several of our compatriots were killed and wounded,” a spokesman for the Afghan Interior Ministry Qari Sayed Khosti tweeted.
According to him, special forces have arrived at the scene to investigate the case. The perpetrator of the attack is not yet known.
The explosion the cause was not immediately known. A bomb attack on a Shiite mosque in Kunduz, Afghanistan last Friday killed 50 people. At the time, the perpetrator was the terrorist organization Isis-K, a rival to the Taliban, the extremist organization that rules Afghanistan.
About 10 percent of the Afghan population is Shiite. Many of them are hazaras who have been persecuted in Afghanistan for a long time. The Taliban, which rose to power in Afghanistan in August, have vowed to protect the country’s Shiite minority, even though it has its own history of persecuting Shiites.
Bomb attacks on mosques have been quite common in Afghanistan in recent years. The Taliban have promised to stabilize the country after the end of the foreign occupation.
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