Blast outside Indian embassy in Kabul

KABUL (Reuters) – A large bomb exploded near the Indian embassy in the centre of the Afghan capital on Thursday, witnesses and police said, damaging buildings nearby.
Information about casualties was not immediately available but ambulances and other emergency vehicles were at the scene after the blast, which caused damage to a market building.
Rubble and debris could be seen strewn across the road which also houses the Afghan Interior Ministry.
A policeman at the scene told Reuters the bomb had been placed inside a car but he could not say if it was a suicide attack.
“I was busy working when the blast happened. The windows were shattered, I ran into my tent,” said a worker at a nearby building site.
The Indian embassy was the scene in July last year of the deadliest attack in the capital of the eight-year-old war, when a Taliban suicide car bomber killed 58 people, including two senior Indian diplomats, and wounded a further 141.
Violence in Afghanistan has reached its worst levels in a conflict now more than eight years old, with Taliban insurgents spreading their attacks to previously secure areas. This year has also been the deadliest for Western troops in the country.
The mounting violence comes at a time U.S. President Barack Obama is considering whether to send up to 40,000 more troops to Afghanistan as requested by his top commander there, General Stanley McChrystal.
There are now more than 100,000 Western troops serving in Afghanistan, two-thirds of them American.
(Writing by Jonathon Burch; Editing by Sanjeev Miglani)
(For more Reuters coverage of Afghanistan and Pakistan, see: http://www.reuters.com/news/globalcoverage/afghanistanpakistan)