The involvement of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence is suspected in the terror strike at the Indian Embassy in Kabul, whose main targets appear to have been the two senior officials, including the Defence Attache killed in the attack.
An explosive-laden car rammed into the Indian embassy gate in the Shahr-i-Naw area as two cars carrying Brigadier Ravi Dutt Mehta and Counselor V Venkateswar Rao were entering the embassy compound, official sources said in New Delhi.
Brigadier Mehta was just beginning his tenure in Kabul, having been posted to the city nearly five months back on February 15, 2008. He was an air defence artillery officer who was commissioned into the armed forces in June 1976.
Two Indo Tibetan Border Police personnel Ajai Pathania and Roop Singh were also among the 41 people killed in the strike.
Rao's body was flung over the roof by the impact of the explosion that blew off the embassy's gates and outer structure and damaged buildings inside the compound. Two Indian embassy vehicles were also damaged, an official said, adding over 140 people were injured in the blast.
Mehta had recently taken his wife Sunita and two children -- Flight Lieutenant Udit Mehta, M S Bhawiya Mehta -- to Kabul to spend their summer vacation.
Before being posted to the troubled city of Kabul, Mehta had done prolonged tenures in anti-insurgency operations in Jammu and Kashmir and north-east.
His son, who is flying back with the body of his father in the special Indian Air Force IL-76 plane, is a MiG fighter pilot at frontline Jodhpur air base.
The aircraft carrying doctors left for Kabul at 4 pm and is expected to return to New Delhi past midnight, bringing back the dead bodies of the four Indians killed in the blast.
