Six-hours of chaos in Kabul after suicide squad seizes tower block

Helicopter gunships, British Special Forces and Macedonian military snipers were all drafted in to fight off the attack, the most dramatic in a co-ordinated series which left at least six people dead across the city – and forced the British embassy and president Hamid Karzai’s palace into “security lockdown”.

Three of the busiest roads in Kabul were sealed off for most of the day as diplomats cowered in specially designated shelters. Afghan police blasted the concrete tower with heavy machine guns then snipers on board Nato helicopters tried to pick off the attackers in a series of low, slow fly pasts – but all to no avail.

The Scotsman watched from the balcony of a nearby apartment block as the insurgents survived barrage after barrage, lighting up the concrete gloom with their muzzle flashes. Eyewitnesses said two attackers ran to the top of the building, while two others stayed low, defending themselves from Afghan government counter-attacks. Trails of smoke from larger weapons were also visible on at least three occasions from around the tenth floor.

At least three civilians, including a woman, were injured near the US embassy and airlifted to hospital, a military official said. However, a US embassy spokeswoman said no staff had been hurt. The British embassy said it knew of no UK citizens caught up in the attack.

At one point soldiers at Nato’s International Security Assistance Force headquarters barricaded themselves into their dining room – using canteen chairs to block the doors – fearing their perimeter had been breached.

In separate attacks, three suicide bombers targeted Afghan police stations in the west of Kabul. One man was shot dead, but two others detonated their explosive vests, police said.

It was at roughly the same time, in Wazir Akbar Khan where most of the foreign embassies are, that at least four armed men stormed the concrete shell of a construction site.

The building – which has lain half-finished for years – towers over the headquarters of Afghanistan’s secret police, the National Directorate of Security (NDS), and is fewer than 400 metres from the Nato HQ.

By mid-afternoon a thick plume of white smoke was visible above the NDS compound and an Afghan journalist was shot in the leg. According to one eyewitness the bullet came from a policeman’s gun.

Two Afghan attack helicopters – Russian made Mi-35s – circled over the scene at around 4:30pm, and one delivered a short salvo of canon fire – but again the insurgents fought back. It wasn’t until 6pm that Afghan commandos stormed the building.

The attacks came just 48 hours after the commander of US and Nato forces in Afghanistan, General John Allen, claimed to have reversed the insurgency’s momentum. This reporter left the scene at around 6pm when a British soldier asked an Afghan colleague to escort me to back to a “safer” cordon, some 500 metre away.

The Taleban claimed responsibility for the attack, although it had the hallmarks of the Haqqani network, a separate, more sophisticated insurgent organisation which Nato has blamed for similar assaults on the InterContinental hotel and the British Council compound last month.

President Karzai and Nato’s secretary-general Anders Fogh Rasmussen both claimed the attack would not derail plans to hand responsibility for security to Afghan forces.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton added: “We will take all necessary steps, not only to ensure the safety of our people, but to secure the area and to ensure that those who perpetrated this attack are dealt with.”