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Homes in eastern areas of Turkey prone to earthquakes must be better built to withstand jolts like the magnitude 6 temblor that toppled village houses and killed 51 people this week, the Turkish government acknowledged Tuesday.

Hundreds of quake survivors sheltered overnight in tents after being left homeless by Monday’s pre-dawn quake, which exposed Turkey’s lag in constructing sturdy homes near the country’s two major fault lines.

Health Minister Recep Akdag said the mud-brick homes typical of Turkey’s impoverished villages “topple down in the slightest of jolts, and those caught beneath die from lack of air.”

“It has been this way for a hundred years, and we have to beat this,” Akdag said.

The earthquake — which hit at 4:32 a.m. Monday (0232 GMT, 9 p.m. EST Sunday) near the remote village of Basyurt in Elazig province — caught many people in their sleep, shaking the area’s poorly made buildings into piles of rubble. Worst hit appeared to be the Okcular, where 19 of the village’s 900 residents were killed and only a few homes remain standing.

The Kandilli seismology center said there have been more than 100 aftershocks, including one measuring 5.5, since the initial quake, which the U.S. Geological Survey listed as having a magnitude of 5.9.

The region 340 miles (550 kilometers) east of the capital, Ankara, is near the East Anatolian Fault — one of the two major fault lines that cross Turkey.

The other is the North Anatolian Fault, which runs near Turkey’s largest city of Istanbul.

Experts cite a two-thirds chance that a major quake will hit Istanbul within 30 years. Others estimate a 2 percent annual probability of a large temblor in the city that his home to 15 million people, or one-fifth of Turkey’s population.

Despite two massive quakes killing some 18,000 people in northwest Turkey in 1999, seismologists and civil engineers warn that not enough has been done to protect Istanbul in the event of another strong temblor in the region.

Istanbul itself planned to assess the city’s buildings to identify those needing reinforcement or demolition, but experts say the follow-up work has lagged. Part of the problem, some say, is a lack of oversight in construction.

“It is not small earthquakes that kill people, it is unlicensed constructors and disorderly construction that kill,” the Ankara-based Tum civil engineers federation said in a statement.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan blamed many of the 51 deaths from Monday’s quake on the shoddy mud-brick buildings typical of the eastern region.

He pledged the government housing agency would build quake-proof homes in the area.

“We must ensure building resilience,” Labor Minister Faruk Celik said. “We are living on the earthquake zone, and we don’t know what can happen to us from one day to the next.”

Authorities urged the people in Elazig province not to enter damaged homes that could collapse from aftershocks.

Most of the 51 people killed in Monday’s quake were immediately buried according to Muslim traditions, but a few funerals were put off until Tuesday.

Fifteen of the deaths occurred in Yukari Demirci village, four in Kayalik village, another four in Gocmezler village, and 10 died in hospital in Kovancilar town, officials said.

Survivors crowded around bonfires to keep warm overnight while sheltering in makeshift tents made of plastic sheeting provided by the Turkish Red Crescent. The government said it also sent prefabricated homes and mobile kitchens. Hard money training.

A strong, pre-dawn earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 6 struck eastern Turkey on Monday, killing 57 people as it knocked down stone or mud-brick houses and minarets in at least six villages, the government said.

Turkey’s crisis center said about 100 other people were injured in the quake, which hit at 4:32 a.m. (0232 GMT, 9 p.m. EST Sunday) in Elazig province, about 340 miles (550 kilometers) east of Ankara, the capital.

The earthquake, which caught many people as they slept, was centered near the village of Basyurt and followed by more than 50 aftershocks, the strongest measuring 5.5 and 5.3, the Kandilli seismology center said.

The worst-hit area was the village of Okcular, where some 17 people were killed and homes crumbled into piles of dirt. As relatives rushed in for news of their loved ones, authorities blocked access to Okcular so ambulances and rescue teams could maneuver on the village’s narrow roads. Villagers lit fires to keep warm.

“The village is totally flattened,” village administrator Hasan Demirdag told private NTV television.

Ali Riza Ferhat of Okcular said he was woken up by the jolt.

“I tried to get out of the door but it wouldn’t open. I came out of the window and started helping my neighbors,” he told NTV television. “We removed six bodies.”

Another 13 people were killed in the village of Yukari Demirci, Gov. Muammer Erol said, adding that by noon everyone had been removed from the rubble and there was no one left buried inside the debris.

“Everything has been knocked down, there is not a stone in place,” said Yadin Apaydin, administrator for the village of Yukari Kanatli, where he said at least three people died.

The quake was also felt in the neighboring provinces of Tunceli, Bingol and Diyarbakir, where residents fled to the streets in panic and stayed outdoors. Schools were closed for two days in the region. In Tunceli province, students were sent home after the quake caused a school’s walls to crack, the state-run Anatolia news agency reported.

The Elazig quake follows deadly temblors in Haiti and Chile, but Bernard Doft, the seismologist for the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, said there was no direct connection between the three.

“These events are too far apart to be of direct influence to each other,” he said.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Kandilli Observatory’s director, Mustafa Erdik, urged residents not to enter any damaged homes, warning that they could topple from aftershocks that Erdik said could last for days.

Erdogan blamed the mud-brick constructions for the deaths and said the government was instructing its housing agency to construct quake-prone homes in the area.

Television footage showed rescue workers and soldiers at Okcular lifting debris as villagers looked on. Rescuers dug into the dirt, finding the body of an elderly man, and quickly covered him with a sheet.

Two women sat on mattresses wrapped in blankets. The temblor also knocked down barns, killing farm animals.

Turkey’s Red Crescent organization sent tents and blankets to the region. Erdogan said ambulance helicopters, prefabricated homes and mobile kitchens were also being sent.

Earthquakes are frequent in Turkey, much of which lies on top of two main fault lines. In 1999, two powerful earthquakes struck northwestern Turkey, killing about 18,000 people.

In 2007, an earthquake measuring 5.7 damaged buildings in Elazig, briefly trapping a woman under debris. In 2003, an earthquake measuring 6.4 magnitude collapsed a school dormitory in the neighboring province of Bingol, killing 83 children. The collapse was blamed on poor construction. Hard money training.

John Patrick Bedell was a brilliant and seemingly gentle computer whiz, yet so withdrawn that people in this rural community where his parents and grandparents are civic leaders knew little about him — until he opened fire at the Pentagon  this week.

Family and friends now paint a portrait of a troubled man who sank deep into mental illness and anti-government rants, even as his mother — a nursing instructor — tried to seek help.

“The family tried over and over to get him into some kind of treatment, but because he was an adult, they were restricted,” said Reb Monaco, a family friend for three decades. “Patrick himself was in some sort of denial.”

It is still unclear why Bedell opened fire at the Pentagon entrance Thursday — wounding two police officers before he was fatally shot — though he had railed on the Internet about his distrust of the government and his distaste for marijuana laws.

“We may never know why he made this terrible decision,” his devastated family said in a statement Friday. “One thing is clear though — his actions were caused by an illness and not a defective character.”

Bedell, 36, a graduate student in electrical engineering at San Jose State University, was diagnosed as bipolar, or manic depressive, and had been in and out of treatment programs for years.

After a 2006 marijuana and resisting arrest case in Orange County, Calif., his psychiatrist said Bedell tried to self-medicate with pot, inadvertently making his bi-polar disorder symptoms more pronounced.

In a letter to the court in 2008, Bedell explained: “I was experiencing an episode of mental illness… which subsequently led to psychiatric hospitalization. I do not have any record of threatened or actual violence prior to this incident, and I am deeply sorry…”

Bedell lived here with his parents in a gated golf course community. His mother Kaye is director of the nursing program at Gavilan College. His father, Oscar John Bedell Jr., is a private financial adviser.

“In my opinion, they are the typical American Family,” said Pat Loe, a county supervisor who has known the family for 30 years.

But John Bedell disappeared at least twice recently from his parents’ home.

On Jan. 3, a Texas Department of Public Safety officer stopped him for speeding near Amarillo, smelling of marijuana and saying he was heading to the East Coast. Bedell acted strangely, sitting on his knees by the roadside and turning off his cell phone whenever it rang.

After his mother called, the officer asked to speak to her. A patrol spokesman declined to reveal the conversation Friday but said Bedell was cited for possessing drug paraphernalia and released.

Bedell’s mother told Monaco, the family friend, that she had wanted her son taken to a mental institution. “But they couldn’t because he is an adult and he refused,” Monaco said.

The next morning, fearing for their son’s well-being, Bedell’s parents filed a missing person’s report.

Within days, Kaye Bedell found a message on her son’s computer indicating he had spent $600 at a gun store or shooting range in El Dorado County, east of Sacramento. She was afraid he had purchased a gun or ammunition, said San Benito County Sheriff Curtis Hill.

When Bedell returned to his parent’s home Jan. 18, he would not say where he had been, Hill said. Then he left for parts unknown.

On Feb. 1, authorities say he was arrested in Reno, Nev., with more than two ounces of marijuana in his car but no weapons.

Internet postings suggested Bedell was fascinated with conspiracy theories, computer programming, libertarian economics and the science of warfare.

In a 28-page document, Bedell proposed in 2004 that the Pentagon fund his research on smart weapons that might “provide significant new capabilities for the Department of Defense and the individual warfighter.”

On the day of his Pentagon attack, the six-foot tall, blue-eyed software devotee approached the entrance, then opened fire with a 9 mm handgun, wounding two officers. He was mortally wounded.

Bedell seemed an unlikely gunman to David Parent, a professor of electrical engineering at San Jose State University, who knew him as a gentle, star student — “somebody seeking to help others.” Hard money training.

A gunman coolly drew a weapon from his pocket and opened fire at a Pentagon security checkpoint on Thursday in a point-blank attack that wounded two police officers before the suspect was fatally shot.

The two officers suffered grazing wounds and were being treated in a hospital, said Richard Keevill, chief of Pentagon police. The shooter, identified as John Patrick Bedell, 36, of Hollister, Calif., died hours after being admitted to a hospital in critical condition, authorities said. They had no motive for the shooting.

There were signs, however, that Bedell may have resented the military and had doubts about the facts behind the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

In an Internet posting, a user by the name JPatrickBedell wrote that he was “determined to see that justice is served” in the death of Marine Col. James Sabow, who was found dead in the back yard of his California home in 1991. The death was ruled a suicide but the case has long been the source of theories of a coverup.

The user named JPatrickBedell wrote the Sabow case was “a step toward establishing the truth of events such as the September 11 demolitions.”

That same posting railed against the government’s enforcement of marijuana laws and included links to the author’s 2006 court case in Orange County, Calif., for cultivating marijuana and resisting a police officer. Court records available online show the date of birth on the case mentioned by the user JPatrickBedell matches that of the John Patrick Bedell suspected in the shooting.

The shooter walked up to the checkpoint at the Pentagon’s subway entrance in an apparent attempt to get inside the fortified Defense Department headquarters. “He just reached in his pocket, pulled out a gun and started shooting” no more than five feet away, Keevill said. “He walked up very cool. He had no real emotion on his face.” The Pentagon officers returned fire with semiautomatic weapons.

NBC News reported that one of the wounded officers was shot in the leg and the other was hit in the shoulder.

Bedell’s death was confirmed early Friday by Beverly Fields, chief of staff of the D.C. medical examiner’s office; and Leigh Fields, medical legal investigator for the office. Both said Bedell’s body had arrived at the medical examiner’s office.

The assault at the very threshold of the Pentagon — the U.S. capital’s ground zero on Sept. 11, 2001 — came four months after a deadly attack on the Army’s Fort Hood, Texas, post allegedly by a U.S. Army psychiatrist with radical Islamic leanings. In the immediate aftermath Thursday, investigators did not think terrorism was involved but were not ruling that out and did not discuss possible motives.

President Barack Obama was closely following the case with updates from the FBI through his homeland security and counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan,” White House spokesman Nick Shapiro said.

Law enforcement officials identified the suspect as Bedell, 36. They also said they were speaking with a second man, who might have accompanied the shooter, and were running his name through databases. Hard money training.

A string of three deadly suicide bombings killed 30 people in the former insurgent stronghold of Baqouba on Wednesday, including a blast from a suicide bomber who rode in an ambulance with the wounded before blowing himself up at a hospital, police said.

The bombings — Iraq’s deadliest in weeks — come as Iraq is preparing for March 7 parliamentary elections. The crucial balloting will decide who will oversee the country as U.S. forces go home and help determine whether Iraq can overcome the deep sectarian tensions that have divided the nation since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.

U.S. and Iraqi officials have warned repeatedly that insurgents were expected to launch such attacks in an attempt to disrupt the crucial vote. A man purporting to be Abu Omar al-Baghdadi — the leader of an al-Qaida front group in Iraq — has vowed to violently disrupt the vote.

The bombings could also affect the candidacy of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who came to power in 2006 and oversaw a return to relative stability in 2008 and 2009. Al-Maliki has continued to bill himself as the best candidate to assure security in Iraq.

A police spokesman in the volatile Diyala province, Capt. Ghalib al-Karkhi, said the blasts struck in quick succession in Baqouba, 35 miles (60 kilometers) northeast of Baghdad, and also wounded 48 people.

First, a suicide car bomb targeted a local government housing office next to an Iraqi Army facility. Within minutes, another suicide bomber blew up a vehicle about 200 yards (meters) down the street from the first blast at an intersection near the provincial government headquarters where many police and army personnel were located, al-Karkhi said.

A third suicide bomber, wearing an explosives vest, rode in an ambulance with the wounded to the city’s emergency hospital and blew himself up as rescuers and victims from the first two blasts were being rushed in for treatment, he added.

Most of the victims came from the blast at the hospital, al-Karkhi said. Police later safely detonated a fourth car bomb about 220 yards (200 meters) from the hospital.

An official in the Diyala police department who did not want to be identified because he was not authorized to speak to the media confirmed the death toll.

Insurgents often spread out bomb attacks as a way to maximize damage as rescuers and others rush to the scene to help or ferry the victims to hospital for treatment.

No group immediately claimed responsibility, but such attacks have been the hallmark of al-Qaida in Iraq. Police said they arrested four suspects and imposed an open-ended curfew on the city as they search for more suspects.

One witness in Baqouba described being thrown against a nearby wall by the first blast and said that immediately after the explosion, Iraqi security forces began firing their weapons. The witness said she hid in a nearby building, then when the situation appeared to have calmed down, went outside only to hear another blast go off seconds later.

“The place was covered with dust and the smell of TNT powder was all over the area, where panicked people were running and cars were colliding with one another,” said the witness. She spoke on condition of anonymity out of security concerns.

The provincial police chief, Maj. Gen. Abdul-Hussein al-Shimari, was in the hospital at the time of the blast, but was unharmed, al-Karkhi said.

Deputy Interior Minister Iden Khalid said at a press conference later Wednesday in Baghdad that security forces expect further attempts to carry out attacks, but that the security situation will not interfere with Sunday’s vote.

Wednesday’s bombings were the deadliest since the start of February, when a female suicide bomber detonated her explosives inside a way station for Shiite pilgrims marking an important Shiite religious occasion, killing 54 people. At the time, Baghdad’s top security official said extremists were adopting new methods to outwit bomb-detection squads such as stashing explosives deep inside the engines and frames of vehicles.

In January, a two-day wave of suicide car bombers struck three hotels in Baghdad and the city’s main crime lab, killing at least 63 people.

Iraqi authorities have vowed tight security in the capital and the rest of the country in the run-up to the election and on voting day. Generally a vehicle ban is imposed across Iraq, the airport will be shut down on Sunday and hundreds of thousands of police and army troops dispersed across the country.

Baqouba is a mixed Shiite-Sunni city and Diyala’s provincial capital. Both the city and the province were flashpoints of the insurgency, although they have quieted since the height of attacks in 2006 and 2007. Hard money training.

The 40 retirees enjoying summer vacation at a seaside campground nestled under pine trees knew they had to move fast after Chile’s powerful earthquake struck.

They didn’t make it. The tsunami came in three waves, surging 200 yards into this Pacific Ocean resort town and dragging away the bus they’d piled into, hoping to get to high ground. Most of those inside were tourists, and only five of their bodies had been found by Monday, firefighters and witnesses said.

Pelluhue’s horror underscored the destruction wrought by Saturday’s pre-dawn 8.8-magnitude quake and the tsunami that ravaged communities along Chile’s south-central coast — those closest to the quake’s epicenter. Chile’s death toll reached 723, and most died in the wine-growing Maule region that includes Pelluhue.

Survivors here found about 20 bodies, and an estimated 300 homes were destroyed. Most residents were aware of the tsunami threat; street signs pointed to the nearest tsunami evacuation route. The ruins of homes, television sets, clothes, dishwaters and dead fish cover the town’s black sand beaches.

“We ran through the highest part of town, yelling, ‘Get out of your homes!’” said Claudio Escalona, 43, who fled his home near the campground with his wife and daughters, ages 4 and 6. “About 20 minutes later came three waves, two of them huge, about 18 feet each, and a third even bigger. That one went into everything.”

“You could hear the screams of children, women, everyone,” Escalona said. “There were the screams, and then a tremendous silence.”

Destruction is widespread and food scarce all along the coast — in towns like Talca and Cauquenes, Curico and San Javier. In Curanipe, the local church served as a morgue. In Cauquenes, people quickly buried their dead because the funeral home had no electricity.

President Michelle Bachelet said authorities were flying hundreds of tons of food, water and other basics into the region.

After the quake rocked the gritty port town of Talcahuano, Marioli Gatica and her extended family huddled in a circle on the floor of their seaside wooden home, listening to the radio by a lantern’s light.

They heard firefighters urging citizens to stay calm and stay inside. They heard nothing about a tsunami — until it slammed into their house with an unearthly roar. Gatica’s house exploded with water. The family was swept below the surface, swirling amid loose ship containers and other heavy debris that smashed buildings into oblivion all around them.

“We were sitting there one moment and the next I looked up into the water and saw cables and furniture floating,” Gatica said.

Two of the giant containers crushed Gatica’s home. A third grounded between the ocean and where she floated, keeping the retreating tsunami from dragging her and other relatives out to sea. Her 11-year-old daughter, Ninoska Elgueta, clung to a tree as the wave retreated.

All the family survived except Gatica’s 76-year-old mother, Nery Valdebenito, Gatica said. “I think my mother is trapped beneath” the house.

Firefighters with search dogs examined the ruins of her home. The group leader drew his finger across his neck: No one alive there.

Close to 80 percent of Talcahuano’s 180,000 people are homeless, with 10,000 homes uninhabitable and hundreds more destroyed, Mayor Gaston Saavedra said.

“The port is destroyed. The streets, collapsed. City buildings, destroyed,” Saavedra said.

In Concepcion, the biggest city near the epicenter, rescuers drilled through thick concrete to look for survivors trapped inside a toppled 70-unit apartment building. Firefighters had pulled 25 survivors and nine bodies from the structure.

Chile’s defense minister has said the navy made a mistake by not immediately activating a tsunami warning. He said port captains who did call warnings in several coastal towns saved hundreds of lives.

In the village of Dichato, teenagers drinking on the beach were the first to shout the warning when they saw a horseshoe-shaped bay empty about an hour after the quake. They ran through the streets, screaming. Police joined them, using megaphones. Hard money training.

Police fired tear gas and imposed an overnight curfew to control looters who sacked virtually every market in this hard-hit city as Chile’s earthquake toll surpassed 700. President Michelle Bachelet promised imminent deliveries of food, water and shelter for thousands living on the streets.

“We are confronting an emergency without parallel in Chile’s history,” Bachelet declared Sunday, a day after the magnitude-8.8 quake — one of the biggest in centuries — killed at least 708 people and destroyed or badly damaged 500,000 homes. Bachelet said “a growing number” of people were recorded as missing.

In Concepcion, 320 miles (515 kilometers) south of Santiago, firefighters pulling survivors from a toppled apartment building had to pause because of tear gas fired at looters who wheeled away everything from microwave ovens to canned milk at a damaged supermarket across the street.

Ingenious looters used long tubes of bamboo and plastic to siphon gasoline from underground tanks at a closed gasoline station.

Eduardo Aundez, a Spanish professor, watched with disgust as a soldier patiently waited for looters to rummage through a downtown store, then lobbed two tear gas canisters into the rubble to get them out.

“I feel abandoned” by authorities, he said. “We believe the government didn’t take the necessary measures in time, and now supplies of food and water are going to be much more complicated.”

Looters even carted off pieces of a copper statue of South American independence fighter Bernardo O’Higgins next to a justice building.

Efforts to determine the full scope of destruction were undermined by an endless string of terrifying aftershocks that turned more buildings into rubble — and forced thousands to set up tents in parks and grassy highway medians.

“If you’re inside your house, the furniture moves,” said Monica Aviles, pulling a shawl around her shoulders to ward off the cold as she sat next to a fire across the street from her apartment building.

As if to punctuate her fear, an aftershock set off shuddering and groaning sounds for blocks around.

“That’s why we’re here,” she said.

In another part of the city, eight Peruvian families shared a four-story building — the bravest living inside the cracked building, the others in tents out front.

“We’ve received help from the neighbors, from passing taxis and from other people who have offered us a coat or something to eat,” said Samantha Fernandez, who offered space to boyfriend Jose Luis Jacinto after he fled his room during after the quake.

Bachelet signed a decree giving the military control over security in the provinces of Concepcion and Maule and announced a 9 p.m.-6 a.m. curfew for all non-emergency workers.

She ordered troops to help deliver food, water and blankets and clear rubble from roads, and she urged power companies to restore service first to hospitals, health clinics and shelters. Field hospitals were planned for hard-hit Concepcion, Talca and Curico.

Bachelet also ordered authorities to quickly identify the dead and return them to their families to ensure “the dignified burials that they deserve.”

Bachelet, who leaves office March 11, said Chile needs field hospitals and temporary bridges, water purification plants and damage assessment experts — as well as rescuers to help relieve exhausted workers.

Defense Minister Francisco Vidal acknowledged the navy made a mistake by not immediately activating a tsunami warning after the quake hit before dawn Saturday. Port captains in several coastal towns did, saving what Vidal called hundreds of lives. Thirty minutes passed between the quake and a wave that inundated coastal towns.

The quake damaged houses, bridges and highways in Santiago, the capital, though a few flights managed to land at the airport and subway service resumed. Concepcion’s airport remained closed to commercial traffic.

Rescuers searched for an estimated 60 people trapped inside a new, 15-story apartment building that toppled onto its side in Concepcion. Firefighters were lowering a rescuer deep into the rubble when tear gas fired at looters across the street forced them to pause their efforts.

Police officer Jorge Guerra took names of the missing from tearful relatives and friends.

“There are people alive. There are several people who are going to be rescued,” he said — though the next people pulled from the wreckage were dead.

The sound of chain saws, power drills and sledgehammers mixed with the whoosh of a water cannon fired at looters and the shouts of crowds that found new ways into a four-story supermarket each time police retreated. Some looters threw rocks at armored police vehicles outside the Lider market, which is majority-owned by Wal-Mart Stores Inc.

Across the Bio Bio River in the city of San Pedro, looters cleared out a shopping mall. A video store was set ablaze, two automatic teller machines were broken open, a bank was robbed and a supermarket emptied, its floor littered with mashed plums, scattered dog food and smashed liquor bottles.

“They looted everything,” said police Sgt. Rene Gutierrez, 46. “Now we’re only here to protect the building — what’s left of the building.”

The quake generated waves that lashed coastal settlements, leaving behind sticks, scraps of metal and masonry houses ripped in two. A beachside carnival in the village of Lloca was swamped in the tsunami. A carousel was twisted on its side and a Ferris wheel rose above the muddy wreckage. Adobe buildings in Talca’s town center were flattened.

State television showed scenes of devastation in coastal towns and on Robinson Crusoe Island, where it said the tsunami drove almost 2 miles (3 kilometers) into the town of San Juan Bautista. Officials said at least five people were killed there and more were missing.

Bus terminals overflowed with vacationers in Chile’s provinces trying to check on their homes. Chile’s summer vacation period ends Monday.

In Washington, the State Department urged Americans to avoid tourist and other nonessential travel to Chile. U.S. citizens in Chile were asked to contact family and friends in the United States, whether by telephone, Internet or cell-phone text messaging.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton planned to briefly visit Santiago on Tuesday as part of a five-nation Latin America trip. Hard money training.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai has condemned suicide attacks in the capital that killed at least 17 people including Indian citizens saying the strikes won’t hurt Afghan-Indian relations.

In a statement, Karzai said he “strongly condemns” the terrorist attacks that occurred Friday targeting two guesthouses in central Kabul where most of the guests were Indian.

“Attacks on Indian citizens will not affect relations between India and Afghanistan,” he said.

Karzai expressed his sadness to the people and government of India, and sent his condolences to the families of those killed and wounded.

He says Afghan officials are investigating the incident and who is behind it.

The Taliban claimed responsibility saying five suicide bombers conducted the early morning attacks on two buildings used by foreign citizens.

Suicide bombers attacked in the heart of Kabul on Friday, triggering a series of explosions and gunbattles that killed at least 17 people in an area of residential hotels rented by Indian embassy workers and other foreigners, police and witnesses said.

The Taliban claimed responsibility, saying five suicide bombers conducted the early morning attacks on two buildings used by foreign citizens. Police said Indians were among those killed in the blasts.

“Today’s suicide attack took place in our residential complex. We are representing India,” Dr. Surbod Sanjiv Paul of India said at a military hospital, where his wounded foot was bandaged.

He said he was holed up in his bathroom for three hours inside one of the small hotels when it came under attack.

“When I was coming out, I found two or three dead bodies. When firing was going on, the first car bomb exploded and the full roof came on my head.”

The attacks in Kabul came as thousands of U.S., Afghan and NATO soldiers were in their second week of a major offensive against a Taliban stronghold in the town of Marjah in southern Afghanistan. NATO said one service member was killed Friday by a roadside bomb, bringing to 14 the number of service members who have died in the operation in Helmand province.

In recent weeks, more than two dozen senior and midlevel Taliban figures have been detained in Pakistan, suggesting the attack in the capital could be a way for the militants to show the insurgency remains potent.

At least 17 people were killed in Friday’s attack and 32 wounded, said Abdul Ghafar Sayedzada, head of criminal investigation for the Kabul police. He said three of the dead were police officers and most of the civilians killed were Indians.

The targets included two residential hotels. A car bomb flattened the Hamid Guesthouse and assailants also attacked the nearby Park Residence, Sayedzada said. An Associated Press reporter saw police carry seven bodies from the Park Residence.

The explosions woke up residents near the Kabul City Center, a nine-story shopping area that includes the four-star Safi Landmark Hotel. Witnesses said one explosion created a crater about 3 feet (1 meter) wide and windows of the nearby Safi hotel were blown out.

“I saw foreigners were crying and shouting,” said Najibullah, a 25-year-old hotel worker who ran out into the rain-slickened street in just his underwear when he heard the first explosion.

Najibullah, whose face and hands were covered in blood, said he saw two suicide bombers at the site. “It was a very bad situation inside,” he said. “God helped me, otherwise I would be dead. I saw one suicide bomber blowing himself up.”

A large plume of black smoke rose from the area. Shattered glass littered the streets, which were mostly emptied because it was the first day of the Afghan weekend. Afghan police, armed with Kalashnikov rifles, crouched behind traffic barriers with guns ready as a light rain fell and shots sounded from multiple sides.

Police escorted a middle-aged woman in pink pajamas out of the area. She wore a brown sweater, but no shoes and her socks sopped up water as she walked as if in a daze down the street. “I haven’t seen. … Where are my …?” she said, speaking only in sentence fragments.

More than two hours after the first explosion, gunfire continued to ring out around one of the guesthouses. Police with gas masks were attempting to smoke out a suspected attacker holed up in the basement of the building, according to a police officer at the scene who only gave his first name, Abdulrahman.

The Canadian Embassy issued a statement saying the violence would not undermine international commitment to Afghanistan.

“Attacks, such as today’s bombing, will not deter Canada or its international partners from its commitment to support Afghans in their efforts to create a stable, democratic and self-sufficient society,” the embassy said in a strong condemnation of the attack.

Jack Barton, an Australian aid worker, said he was awakened by a large blast that blew in the windows of the guesthouse where he was staying and filled the room with dust.

“There was very intense street fighting outside the guesthouse compound. It happened very close by. After an hour, it slowly drifted away,” he said.

It was the first attack in the Afghan capital since Jan. 18, when teams of suicide bombers and gunmen targeted government buildings, leaving 12 dead, including seven attackers. On Dec. 15, a suicide car bomber hit near a hotel frequented by foreigners, killing eight people.

In Oct. 28, gunmen with suicide vests stormed a small residential hotel, leaving 11 dead, including five U.N. staff and three attackers. Earlier that month, on Oct. 8, a suicide car bomber detonated his vehicle outside the Indian Embassy, killing 17 people.

India is among the largest economic donors to Afghanistan apart from countries that have sent troops to the NATO-led mission. India is seeking regional allies and access to oil- and gas-rich central Asia.

But India’s growing role here is strongly opposed by Pakistan, which wants a friendly government without ties to its archrival, and by the Taliban because of Indian links to rival ethnic communities here. Many of the Islamic extremist groups in the region have been fighting the Indians for years in Indian-controlled parts of Kashmir.

Police on the scene said the two small hotels appeared to be the targets of the attack because they sustained the most direct damage, said officer Gulam Mustafa. The Park Residence has housed at least some Indian Embassy workers for the past five or six years, said security guard Ahmad, who only gave one name. He said other foreigners also lived there.

“It was full mostly of Indians. They were doctors, engineers,” said Ali Jan Rezaee, who owns a bakery down the street.

The windows of his bake shop were broken and trays of cookies inside were littered with glass shards. “I am very happy I am alive, I am safe,” he said.

An Indian Embassy staffer, who lives at one the hotels that was hit, said he hid in his room until the fighting stopped.

“It was early in the morning and firing started in the hotel,” said Kasaif, who did not give his first name. “We stayed inside our room and locked the door.” Hard money training.

The Afghan government took official control of the southern Taliban stronghold of Marjah on Thursday, installing an administrator and raising the national flag  while U.S.-led troops rooted out final pockets of militants.

The ceremony occurred in a central market as U.S. Marines and Afghan troops slogged through bomb-laden fields in northern parts of the town. Some 700 residents gathered to see Abdul Zahir Aryan formally appointed as the top government official in Marjah, according to U.S. officials at the event.

Aryan and a team of advisers held their first meeting in the town Monday and have been staying overnight in a building there since Tuesday, said Marlin Harbinger, the senior U.S. government representative for Helmand province, which contains Marjah.

“Today’s event was the civilian Afghan government re-establishing itself officially in front of the local residents,” Harbinger said. The Afghan army had previously raised the country’s green-and-red flag nearby, but that was only a claim of military control over that neighborhood, he said.

The ceremony opened with a reading from the Quran, and then Aryan and the Helmand governor pledged to those gathered that they were ready to listen to their needs and eager to provide them with basic services that they didn’t have under the Taliban.

After the ceremony, the generals and high-level officials departed in helicopters, but Aryan remained.

The mass assault in southern Helmand province, with 15,000 NATO and Afghan troops, is the largest military operation in Afghanistan since the U.S.-led ouster of the Taliban regime in 2001.

NATO’s strategy is to rout Taliban militants from the town, which had served as a logistical base and drug trafficking hub, restore the Afghan government’s presence, and rush in public services in a bid to win over the confidence of local communities.

In the north Thursday, the Marines’ progress was slowed by difficult terrain with no roads, few tracks and many hidden mines, but there was no gunfire by midmorning. Several armored vehicles fell into irrigation canals while others were damaged by roadside bombs.

About 100 fighters are believed to have regrouped into the 28-square mile (45-square kilometer) area known as Kareze, according to commanders with the 3rd Battalion, 6th Marines Regiment. The Marines and their Afghan partners are working to secure the area, believed to be the last significant pocket of Taliban insurgents in town.

The last few days have been relatively calm throughout Marjah, with limited engagement by insurgents, as troops secured areas they had already taken and moved into position to tackle the final insurgent holdouts.

NATO said in a statement that while there are still occasional gunfights in the town, the number of residents returning has increased in recent days and shops have opened to sell telephones and computers alongside fresh fruits and vegetables.

In a sign that NATO’s push to win over the population may be gaining traction, bomb tips from residents have increased by nearly 50 percent, the alliance said.

As the offensive closes in on its second week, 13 NATO troops and three Afghan soldiers have been killed, according to military officials. Eighty NATO troops have been wounded, along with eight Afghans.

At least 28 civilians have been killed, including 13 children, according to the Afghan human rights commission.

The civilian toll has raised fears that NATO may lose the support of the population even as it drives out the Taliban. The deaths come even though NATO has said its priority is protecting the civilian population and has adopted strict rules to prevent casualties.

A spokesman for the Afghan Defense Ministry said both the Afghan government and NATO troops realized they had to be realistic and accept that there would be civilian deaths.

“Preventing civilian casualties is our biggest challenge,” Gen. Mohammad Zahir Azimi told reporters in Kabul. “You should not expect zero casualties, either from our side or from the international forces. That will only happen when the fighting is over. And we are all trying to make that happen.”

NATO spokesman Brig. Gen. Eric Tremblay, speaking alongside Azimi, urged Afghans to recognize that international troops are putting themselves in greater danger in order to try to protect civilians.

“We are going beyond the laws of armed conflict by increasing our risk,” Tremblay said. Hard money training.

Math teacher David Benke says he had no time to fear for his life when he tackled a man he said was preparing to reload a rifle to shoot students at a Colorado middle school who were heading home for the day.

And Benke doesn’t consider himself a hero for stopping the 32-year-old accused of wounding two students Tuesday at the Littleton school that’s just miles from Columbine High School, the site of one of the nation’s deadliest school shootings.

“You know, it bugs me that he got another round off,” Benke said of the two shots that authorities say Bruco Strongeagle Eastwood fired.

On Tuesday, Jefferson County Sheriff Ted Mink praised Benke, calling him a hero. Benke, the father of 7-year-old twins and a 13-year-old girl, fought back tears after Mink thanked him.

“I know he feels bad about not being able to intervene sooner, but believe me when I say, I think he stopped what could have been a more tragic event than it was this afternoon,” Mink said.

The victims, Deer Creek Middle School students Reagan Webber and Matt Thieu, were both treated at Littleton Adventist Hospital. Spokeswoman Christine Alexander said Webber was treated and released to her home, and Thieu was transferred to another hospital.

Authorities say both victims had surgery Tuesday.

Benke and other teachers were monitoring the parking lot in the afternoon when Benke heard what he thought was a firecracker and began walking toward the noise.

“At first when I was walking over there, it was kind of what a teacher does,” Benke said, still shaken hours after Tuesday’s shooting. “`Hey kid, what are you doing,’ you know that kind of thing.”

“Unfortunately he got another round off before I could grab him. He had a bolt action rifle …. He figured out that he wasn’t going to be able to get another round chambered before I got to him so he dropped the gun and then we were kind of struggling around trying to get him subdued.”

Benke said he doesn’t remember the students running from the scene or the time it took sheriff’s deputies to arrive at the school. He didn’t have time to think about anything happening around him.

The 6-5, former college basketball player oversees the school’s track team. He said another teacher was quickly on the scene and both of them pinned the gunman to the ground.

“I basically have my arms and legs wrapped around him, (the other teacher) has his forearm around his front and we were basically trying to get the guy to quit struggling.

School officials could not immediately confirm the names of other teachers who helped subdue the shooter.

“I talked to him while we were on the ground. I was underneath him and his face was pretty close to mine,” Benke said. “I asked him, `Why did you do this? Were you a student here?’

“He either didn’t respond or his responses didn’t make a whole lot of sense,” Benke said.

Denver station KUSA-TV reported that Eastwood attended Deer Creek Middle School in the early 1990s.

Eastwood has an arrest record in Colorado dating back to 1996 for menacing, assault, domestic violence and driving under the influence of alcohol, according to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation.

In 2005, he participated in a NASA-funded medical study in which he spent 10 days in a hospital bed so scientist could study muscle wasting, an affliction experienced by astronauts during long flights, according to a story in the Rocky Mountain News.

He told the newspaper that he had a lifelong dream of being an astronaut and described his occupation to the newspaper as horse trainer working at his father’s Eagle’s Nest Ranch in Hudson.

Investigators said Eastwood visited the school previously and was inside shortly before the shooting. He is expected to make his first court appearance Wednesday and may face at least two counts of attempted murder.

A man who answered the phone Tuesday night at a number listed for Eastwood identified himself only as “Mr. Eastwood” and said he was Bruco Eastwood’s father. He was at a loss for words.

“There’s nothing you can say about it. What can you say?” the man told The Associated Press. “Pretty dumb thing to do. I feel bad for the people involved.” He wouldn’t comment further. Hard money training.