Taliban gunmen kill nine civilians in attack at Kabul's Serena hotel

Teenage Taliban gunmen who slipped into a top luxury hotel in Kabul on Thursday night shot and killed two young girls along with seven other civilians in the latest attack in a wave of violence hitting Afghanistan ahead of presidential elections. Six others were injured.

Four foreigners were also among the victims of the carefully planned assault, which was apparently aimed at undermining a vote now just two weeks away. Election monitors were among the Serena hotel's guests.

It came days after a marketplace bomb killed 16 people in the north and just hours after a complex attack on a police headquarters in Jalalabad city claimed at least 18 lives. On Friday morning an attack in southern Kandahar killed three. The Taliban has vowed to disrupt the poll and said anyone who votes or works on the election is risking their life.

"This attack is connected to the election, our enemy is trying to sow uncertainty about our future," said Sediq Sediqqi, an interior ministry spokesman, at a news conference the morning after the assault on the hotel. "They are threatening the security of the election, which is one of the biggest events in the history of Afghanistan."

The gunmen launched their attack by opening fire in the Serena's popular buffet restaurant, which was packed with families and officials celebrating the start of the Afghan new year to live music.

Their most prominent victim was Afghan journalist Sardar Ahmad, who worked for Agence France Press and had his own media company. Ahmad's wife and two daughters were also killed, and his toddler son is now fighting for his life in hospital.

Tributes to him and his work poured in from colleagues, politicians including the former warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum and readers in Afghanistan and beyond. "My dear Sardar rest in peace! Fuck you terrorists you bloody killed my best friend with all his family," Parwiz Shamal, a journalist with TOLO, an Afghan television station, said on Twitter. The foreign victims were from New Zealand, Canada, India and Pakistan, said Sediqqi, but he did not release names or any other details.

The attackers were armed only with six tiny handguns, barely bigger than cigarette packets, but shooting went on for over two hours as security forces hunted down the last attacker, who hid inside toilets at the sprawling hotel complex. Hundreds of staff and guests took refuge in a cavernous bunker, while others were evacuated from the building.

The last person rescued, Sediqqi said, was the gunmen's first target. A senator who had been dining with three other legislators hurled glasses at the young attackers and escaped into a nearby garden where he hid for four hours, injured but alive. The other three all survived the attack unharmed.

The Serena had been one of the few places in Afghanistan where both foreigners and the country's elite could relax and enjoy rare luxuries such as a swimming pool and 24-hour electricity. Tight layers of security including armed guards, multiple steel gates, metal detectors and x-ray machines made the five-star hotel feel safe even though it had been hit by an attack in 2008 that killed seven people.

Thursday's attackers apparently hid handguns and bullets, wrapped in blue tissue paper and hidden under in the soles of their chunky shoes.

They were all young men, with fake ID cards from southern Kandahar province with their ages given as between 19 and 25, although in pictures taken after the attack they looked barely out of their teens.

They had told guards on the door that they were going to the restaurant for dinner, the interior ministry spokesman said, although the government is investigating why their guns were not discovered during security checks.

The attack may drive some election monitors away. At least one mission was reportedly packing up just hours after the attack. Others said that while the deaths were tragic, violence was a risk in any country at war and they would continue with their mission.

"If you go to Afghanistan, a country where in the last year thousands of incidents have taken place, you cannot let yourself be influenced by the next incident," said Thijs Berman, a member of the European parliament and head of the EU election-monitoring mission.

He added that his team had a commitment to millions of Afghans risking their lives to organise and participate in the vote. "You have voters, you have civil servants, you have policemen and women, and thousands of people organising this election. Do they find themselves deterred from doing so by finding the country is not the safest place in the world?"