2 Afghans killed by car bomb at US facility in Kabul

A car bomb exploded outside a U.S. contractor’s compound on Monday in Kabul, killing at least two Afghan workers and injuring more than a dozen others, according to reports.

In a separate incident Monday, 10 girls in eastern Afghanistan were killed by the accidental triggering of an old landmine, U.S. officials said.

The attack in the Afghan capital blew apart large sections of the compound’s exterior wall and collapsed a roof on a building inside, the Associated Press reported.

Baryalai, the Afghan security officer for McClean, Va.-based Contrack, told the AP that a suicide bomber drove a vehicle with explosives to the wall of the compound and detonated it, although Afghan police could not confirm that report.

Baryalai, who goes by one name, said an American official of the company was seriously wounded, and injured employees included Americans, Afghans and South Africans.

A Taliban spokesman took responsibility for the attack, telling reporters a suicide car bomber targeted the company’s compound because it was working with the government.

The landmine explosion in Nangarhar Province that killed 10 girls occurred Monday when the girls apparently walked onto a minefield from the 1990s. The mines were used when Afghan resistance fighters were battling Soviet forces.

"It was a British-made anti-tank mine," said Abigail Hartley, the manager of the U.N. mine program, told the AP.

U.S. Commander in Afghanistan Gen. John Allen said in a statement that he was “deeply saddened” by the girls’ deaths. He noted that Afghanistan is one of the “most heavily mined countries on earth.”

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