MAZAR-I-SHARIF - Explosions and gunfire rang out late Sunday as militants tried to storm the Indian diplomatic mission in a northern Afghan city, officials said, in the latest assault on an Indian installation.
The attack on the consulate in Mazar-i-Sharif comes after Prime Minister Narendra Modi's much-hyped diplomatic outreach to arch-rival Pakistan following his first visit to Afghanistan.
"We are being attacked," an Indian consulate official told AFP by telephone from inside the heavily-guarded compound. "Fighting is still going on."
The official, who was hunkered down in a secure area within the complex, said all consulate employees were safe and accounted for.
No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack, which comes just a day after a deadly assault by suspected militants on an Indian airbase near the Pakistan border.
A local police spokesman in Mazar-i-Sharif, a city in the relatively tranquil province of Balkh, said security officials had cordoned off the area where sporadic gunshots were ringing out after a series of explosions.
Another official told AFP that government forces had launched an operation to gun down the assailants, but it was not clear if they had managed to breach the consulate.
Vikas Swarup, a spokesman for India's ministry of external affairs, told AFP that no Indian casualties had been reported so far.
The consulate assault is the latest in a series of attacks on Indian targets in Afghanistan.
According to Reuters, with an unknown number of gunmen holed up in a house across the street from the consulate, special forces units prepared an operation to clear the attackers, police spokesman Shir Jan Durani said.
Two loud explosions and gunshots were heard earlier as the gunmen launched an attack from a nearby house, Muneer Ahmad Farhad, a spokesman for the Balkh province governor said.
No details were immediately available on any casualties or damage or on the number of attackers and there was no immediate claim of responsibility.
Farhad said insurgents had hidden in a house near the consulate and struck after darkness fell.
He said the attackers had tried to enter the consulate but had not been able to and had shut themselves into a house across the street. "Right now our security forces are fighting them," he said.
Nine civilians, including seven children, were killed in August 2013 when suicide bombers targeted the Indian consulate in the Afghan city of Jalalabad, detonating an explosives-packed car.
The Indian consulate in Herat, Afghanistan was attacked on May 23, 2014 by four heavily-armed militants. All the attackers were killed during a lengthy gunbattle, one by the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) and three by the Afghan security forces.
The Afghan National Directorate of Security recently said troops arrested a suicide bomber, thwarting his plans to attack the Indian consulate in eastern city of Jalalabad, the capital of Nangarhar province, ahead of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Kabul on December 25.
The Taliban militants attacked a French restaurant in capital Kabul two days ago, killing two people including a young boy.
The assault comes a week after Modi paid a surprise visit to Pakistan, the first by an Indian premier in 11 years.
The surprise visit immediately followed a whirlwind tour of Kabul, where Modi inaugurated a smart Indian-built parliament complex built at an estimated cost of $90 million, and gifted three Russian-made attack helicopters to the Afghan government.
A day after his visit, Pakistan's powerful army chief General Raheel Sharif travelled to Kabul in a bid to prepare the ground for fresh peace talks with the resurgent Taliban.
Afghan President Ashraf Ghani on Thursday said both sides agreed to hold a first round of dialogue between Afghanistan, Pakistan, US and China on January 11 to lay out a comprehensive roadmap for peace.