Six dead in Taliban attack on Kabul hotel

Taliban militants and a suicide bomber stormed Kabul's main hotel used by foreigners, killing at least six people and raising questions Tuesday about how they managed to breach tight security.

UN chief Ban Ki-moon suggested the attack may have been targeting Norway's visiting foreign minister Jonas Gahr Stoere, who was inside the luxury Serena hotel at the time and took shelter with other guests in the basement.

A U.S. citizen and a Norwegian journalist were among the dead.

The Serena hotel, opened in November 2005, is the main venue in the capital for high-level functions of the Western-backed government, as well as foreign embassies and businesses.

As such it is heavily barricaded and guarded against security threats amid an increasingly violent Taliban-led insurgency.

Australia, which has around 900 troops operating in Afghanistan, announced Tuesday that it was relocating its embassy out of the hotel.

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahed said four men armed with Kalashnikovs "entered the Serena hotel and fired on foreigners." One of them was wearing a suicide vest and blew himself up.

NATO's International Security Assistance Force, which has 40,000 troops in Afghanistan, said hotel guards shot dead one attacker, but it was unclear what had happened to any others.

UN chief Ban suggested the attack, which came as Stoere was preparing for a dinner meeting, may have been aimed at him.

"I feel fortunate that he was not injured, but that really confirms that we must take necessary measures to address" terrorism," he told reporters at the United Nations in New York.

The Taliban were in government in Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, when they were ousted in a US-led invasion launched weeks after the September 11 suicide attacks in the United States by the al-Qaeda group, which was being sheltered by the hardline Islamic movement.

The Taliban have since been waging an insurgency against the government in Kabul and the international forces shoring it up.

Most attacks have been focused on the southern and eastern areas bordering Pakistan, but rippled across the country last year in the deadliest 12 months in the insurgency to date.