Three Americans were shot and killed by an Afghan security guard at a hospital in Kabul on Thursday morning. One of the victims was a doctor, while the two others were a father and son visiting the Cure International Hospital, Afghanistan’s health minister Suriya Dalil told reporters. (The Associated Press reports that all three were physicians.) An American nurse was also wounded in the attack.
Cure Hospital, which is funded by a Christian charity and specializes in maternal and children’s health, has been operating in Kabul since 2005. The doctor who was killed had been working there for seven years. “They were not the people carrying guns, they did not have military uniforms, they came here under immense pressure and were here only to serve the people of Afghanistan,” Dalil said. “This was an inhumane and brutal action, and unfortunately will impact our health services.”
The motives of the gunman, a member of Afghan Public Protection Force who had been assigned to the hospital, are not yet clear. He was injured in the attack and underwent emergency surgery at the same facility under heavy guard on Thursday afternoon. While the Taliban has claimed responsibility for several similar attacks in the last year, including the March killing of an AFP journalist and his family, they didn’t say anything about Thursday’s shooting.
