'Panic room' saves teachers as Taleban attack on British Council kills eight

A WHITE truck packed with explosives tore down the outer wall. An accomplice then ran inside and triggered a second explosion. It was 5:40am in Kabul and the British Council was under attack.

It would be more than nine hours until the last shots rang out from the smoking remains of the compound. By then, at least eight people, including three Afghan guards, four policemen and a member of New Zealand's SAS, would be dead.

But it was what happened in the minutes after the first explosion that may have saved the lives of the British Council staff.

Amid the chaos and clatter of gunfire, a British security guard employed as their bodyguard led two female teachers to a designated panic room in the bowels of the building.

The British Ambassador in Afghanistan, Sir William Patey, said the three of them spent the next five hours holed up together - but talking to embassy officials via a mobile phone - as insurgents fought Special Forces, with suicide vests, rocket propelled grenades and machine guns all around them.

Eyewitnesses said the first police to arrive were shot dead as soon as they stepped out of their trucks. The insurgents were shooting from the compound roof.

Moments later, a squad of New Zealand's SAS - the same unit that responded to an attack on Kabul's Intercontinental Hotel in June - arrived at the scene, but by then, as many as four armed men had clambered over the ruined blast walls and taken up fighting positions inside the building. Police said three of the attackers had been disguised as women, wearing all-enveloping burqas.

Apache helicopter gunships swooped overhead as black smoke billowed into the sky. A variety of explosions rang out through the morning, punctuated by long bursts of automatic fire, shorter volleys and occassional single shots, in a residential suburb of Kabul.

Police at the scene said a team of Nato soldiers had clambered through the debris on the edge of the compound to try to secure the teachers and their bodyguard, but officials said they then became trapped inside.

"There was a gap between them being safely in our hands and them actually being extracted," Sir William said. Once they had found all three people in the panic room, they had to make sure "the exit route was secure".

Sir William said they were concerned about booby traps and terrorists perhaps hiding between the relative safety of the panic room and the armoured convoys and ambulances waiting on the street outside.

Almost three hours after the attack started, a sniper from New Zealand's SAS walked towards the flames. Soldiers from a British garrison near Kabul airport arrived to set up a cordon outside the compound, with help from French and US troops.

Civilian security guards from the British Embassy, located in a different part of the city, were also at the scene for most of the morning.

One soldier said they were nervous about secondary attacks because there was intelligence to suggest the Taleban commander in charge was in the area and coordinating the assault.

A spokesman for the Taleban, Zabiullah Mujahid, claimed responsibility for the attack, which came as Afghanistan marked the anniversary of its independence in 1919, when Britain formally relinquished its colonial ambitions. "We decided to target a British organisation because today is Afghanistan's independence day," he said.

Shortly before midday, Nato soldiers were seen performing emergency CPR on a wounded soldier on a stretcher on the street. He was transferred to a Black Hawk helicopter, which had landed on a nearby roundabout, and flown to the military hospital at Kabul airport. Nato later announced a soldier had been killed in the operation, and Prime Minister David Cameron said he had phoned his counterpart in New Zealand, John Key, to thank him for their sacrifice.

One of the women working for the British Council was from South Africa, a spokesman for the British Embassy said. All three of them were all transferred to the embassy last night, where they were said to be traumatised but physically unharmed.

The last shots rang out at 3pm - three bursts of automatic fire, more than nine hours after the attack started. It was then the Afghan policemen who had been waiting outside were finally ushered into the compound. Four of them carried the body of an alleged attacker on to the street. He was dressed in a striped polo shirt and blue adidas tracksuit bottoms, and he was bleeding from a wound in his back.

As bystanders clamoured for a closer look, one of the policeman who had carried him cursed him as a Pakistani and spat on his corpse. No-one seemed to mind.