A teenage suicide bomber has killed six people, including four children, in an attack near the headquarters of the Nato-led international coalition (Isaf) in Kabul.
The boy, with explosives hidden in a backpack, slipped into the Afghan capital's fortified diplomatic district by posing as one of the many street children who sell wristbands and other trinkets to foreigners there, a senior police officer said.
"The killer was a child, aged 12 to 14," said Haji Wasiullah Taj, chief of district 10 where the bombing happened. "A lot of sellers go down this road and the security teams thought he was one of them, but he was not known to the children here."
Most of his victims were from the group of young vendors he had imitated, including sisters Khorshid, 13, and Fatana, aged eight, local residents who helped clear away the bodies said.
The spokesman for the Ministry of Interior suggested the work could be retaliation from the Haqqani network, a Taliban-linked group responsible for most of the high-profile attacks in Kabul in recent years, after the US government blacklisted them as a terrorist group on Friday.
It was not clear why the teenage bomber had ignored a host of diplomatic and military targets within a few dozen metres of where he struck – including the entrance to Nato headquarters, the outer gate of the US embassy and the residences of the Italian, Indian and Spanish ambassadors – to decimate a group of Afghan civilians.
"His aim was to get to Nato headquarters or the US embassy. The other children were apparently giving him a hard time, but we don't know the reason why he detonated [his explosives] here," Taj said.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for the blast. Spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said the group had sent an adult attacker to target a CIA base and killed only US soldiers, but the intelligence agency's office is several hundred metres away from the explosion site, and multiple eyewitnesses said the dead were all Afghan.
A group of children were gathered around an iPhone one of them had got from a foreigner, when the bomber struck, said 14 year-old Azizullah. "They wanted to play games on it, and that is when it happened," he told the Guardian. He survived because his father had summoned him away to watch the family stall minutes before the explosion, he said.
Hafizullah Suleimanzai, the 40 year-old father of Azizullah, who sells mobile phone scratch cards nearby, said he was closing his business because of the blast. "I don't know how I will support my children but this is too dangerous."
The blast site is strewn with a child's pink plastic sandals were scattered next to shards of glass, twisted metal and pools of blood. Afghan forensic teams collected human remains in plastic bags. A woman who lost her husband shouted "death to America", before she was led away weeping by a relative.