UN asks Afghan Government to increase security following car bomb

The United Nations has called on the Afghan Government to provide more security for its operations following Tuesday’s car explosion outside UN offices in the southern city of Kandahar “so that we continue to provide the services that we can give to the people of Afghanistan.”

"I do not believe that anybody who attacks the United Nations in Afghanistan is a friend of the people of Afghanistan," Secretary-General Kofi Annan's Special Representative, Lakhdar Brahimi, said in a statement made public today at a news briefing in Kabul, the Afghan capital.

"The United Nations has been here for many years helping the Afghan people. We did not in the past, and do not now, have any agenda for or against anybody. Our only agenda has been and remains to help the people of Afghanistan establish peace and stability and reconstruction," he added.

Three security guards provided by the Afghan Ministry of the Interior have been arrested in connection with the blast, Media Relations Officer David Singh told the briefing. "It does not suggest that UN security is flawed," he added. "The investigation of security is a routine measure in such instances and is aimed at securing information."

The Security Council in New York also condemned the attack, which injured a UN guard and a passing Afghan student. "Members of the Council condemned, in the strongest possible terms, the terrorist attack against the United Nations headquarters in Kandahar, Afghanistan, that occurred on 11 November, 2003," the Council President for November, Ambassador Ismael Abraão Gaspar-Martins of Angola, said in a statement.