Two Bangladeshis, among nine others, were killed when four gunmen opened fire inside the luxurious Serena Hotel complex in central Kabul on Thursday night.
Later, the gunmen were shot dead.
Thursday’s attack shattered the illusions of the Serena as one of the few remaining safe havens for the rich or foreign in Kabul, and the fallout was swift, reported International NY Times.
The National Democratic Institute decided on Friday morning to pull out staff members who were staying at the hotel after one of them, Luis María Duarte, a former Paraguayan diplomat, was killed. Duarte and the other staff members were in Afghanistan to observe next month’s presidential election, and the organisation was reassessing its election monitoring activities.
The other dead in Thursday’s attack included the mother and two of her children, along with their father, Sardar Ahmad, a prominent Afghan journalist. A Canadian and another Afghan woman.
The Taliban quickly claimed responsibility for the attack, reinforcing fears that the election to replace President Hamid Karzai will be accompanied by widening bloodshed. A series of attacks have made it apparent that Afghan and foreign civilians are likely to bear the brunt of the violence, which in the past two weeks has included a suicide bombing at a bazaar in northern Afghanistan and an assassination of a Swedish journalist on a crowded Kabul street.
