Foreign Agents Blamed In Deadly Kabul Attack

Afghans Avoid Naming Pakistan, Though

KUNDUZ, Afghanistan, July 8 -- Investigators have found evidence that a deadly suicide bombing attack against the Indian Embassy in Kabul this week was planned with the help of a foreign intelligence agency, a spokesman for Afghanistan's president said Tuesday.

Humayun Hamidzada, chief spokesman for President Hamid Karzai, pointedly avoided direct references to Pakistan during a news conference but hinted that the scale and complexity of the strike against the embassy bore the markings of previous attacks linked to Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency.

"The sophistication of this attack and the kind of material that was used, the specific targeting, everything has the hallmarks of a particular agency that has conducted similar attacks inside Afghanistan. We have sufficient evidence to say that," Hamidzada said. "The project was designed outside Afghanistan. It was exported to Afghanistan." He offered no further specifics about the evidence of foreign involvement.

Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani told the Associated Press on Tuesday that his government was not involved in the attack. Gillani said that Pakistan is seeking to stabilize a region fractured by conflict and that it had no interest in undermining Afghanistan's security.

The attack against the Indian Embassy killed at least 41 people and wounded 150 others, making it one of the deadliest in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban in late 2001.

The bombing was also one of the worst attacks on an Indian target outside that country, taking the lives of an Indian defense attache, a political information officer and two Indian security officials. Newspapers in New Delhi ran bold headlines about the attack and gruesome photographs of the aftermath.

Relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan have deteriorated sharply in the past three months as attacks in Afghanistan have increased and casualties have mounted with a summer increase in insurgent activity. Last month, Hamidzada and other Afghan officials accused the Inter-Services Intelligence agency of helping to plot a prison break in the southern city of Kandahar that freed 1,000 inmates, including 350 to 450 Taliban fighters. In late June, Afghan officials accused the agency of aiding in an assassination attempt against Karzai during a military parade in Kabul in April.

Pakistani officials denied any role in the assassination attempt, and that the intelligence agency supports the Taliban.

The Pakistani intelligence agency aided the Taliban's rise to power in Afghanistan in the early 1990s after the Soviets abandoned their decade-long invasion of the country. Agents maintained strong relations with their Taliban clients for years during Afghanistan's most recent civil war but officially broke off their support for the Islamist insurgency after Pakistan allied itself with U.S.-led coalition forces following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Afghan and Western officials continue to voice doubts that the agency has completely severed its ties to insurgents in Afghanistan.

In an interview late last month, Gen. David D. McKiernan, the newly appointed commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, lauded the professionalism of his military counterparts in Pakistan but acknowledged suspicions about the intelligence agency's role in supporting cross-border attacks. "We certainly are concerned that there is complicity at some level on the Pakistan side that allows the freedom of movement and freedom of maneuver," McKiernan said.

Recent Taliban activity in Afghanistan has caused a rise in casualties among U.S.-led NATO forces. On Tuesday, NATO officials said one soldier was killed and four were injured by a bomb blast while patrolling the eastern Afghan province of Kunar.

Correspondent Emily Wax in New Delhi, India, special correspondent Javed Hamdard in Kabul and staff researcher Robert E. Thomason in Washington contributed to this report.