A source from the Ministry of Public Health (MoPH) on Thursday said that at least 100 people were killed and more than 600 wounded in Wednesday’s truck bombing in Kabul city.
 
The source said the death toll is expected to rise as recovery workers continued Thursday to pull bodies from the rubble.
 
He also said countless people are missing and that many bodies were badly mutilated due to the ferocity of the explosion.
 
This comes amid growing public anger over government's failure to prevent such deadly attacks in the heart of the city.  
 
The truck bombing took place at about 8:20am on Wednesday morning in the busy diplomatic zone of the city.
 
The bombing was one of the worst recorded in Kabul, which has added to the woes of Afghans who are paying the high price of insurgency in the country.
 
On Thursday, recovery operations were still underway at the blast site, as a team of experts from the Ministry of Interior (MoI) tirelessly searched for bodies in the rubble. The truck bomb was so intense that it brought down a number of buildings in the immediate vicinity.
 
Roshan Telecommunication Company, which was close to the blast scene, was badly affected in the explosion. The source said that dozens of people from this company could have been killed.   
 
It is believed however, that the exact number of victims will never be known due to enormity of the explosion.
 
“With consideration of scale of the attack, perhaps at least 20 other people are missing, maybe they are mutilated or burnt completely,” said  Mohammed Salim Rasuli, head of MoPH hospital.
 
Zabi is one relative who is still searching for the bodies of his uncle and three colleagues who are believed to have been caught up in the explosion.
 
“We searched all hospitals in Kabul and got nothing so far, finally we came to the incident site to get information from the police,” said Zabi.
 
Meanwhile, the Ministry of Interior (MoI) said that recovery operations by experts were still underway on Thursday.
 
“We are prepared, our health teams are supporting in this respect according to their abilities,” said Najib Danish, spokesman to MoI.
 
Officials from the Public Health Ministry have said that the majority of those wounded in the explosion were transferred to Kabul’s Emergency Hospital, Wazir Akbar Khan Hospital and Jamhuriat Hospital.
 
According to the MoPH, of the total injured that were taken to hospitals, 100 were taken to the Emergency Hospital, 210 to Wazir Akbar Khan Hospital, 80 to Jamhuriat Hospital, 35 to Ibn-e-Sina hospital and 60 to the NDS hospital.
 
Initially the majority of bodies were transferred to Wazir Akbar Khan Hospital, but later, 60 bodies were transferred from Wazir Akbar Khan Hospital and 15 from Sardar Daud military hospital to the Forensic Hospital.