KABUL, Afghanistan — A suicide bomber attacked an armored car carrying a prominent Afghan women's rights leader and member of Parliament in Kabul on Sunday morning, killing three people and wounding 32 others, Afghan officials said.

The lawmaker who was apparently the target of the attack, Shukria Barakzai, survived the blast, which occurred several hundred feet away from the Parliament building, her destination at the time.

Ms. Barakzai, 42, had once helped run underground schools for girls during the Taliban era. She quickly emerged as a public figure in Afghanistan not long after the American-led coalition toppled the Taliban government.

A member of the assembly that approved Afghanistan's Constitution in early 2004, she was elected to Parliament the following year and re-elected in 2010.

The apparent target of the attack was Shukria Barakzai, an Afghan women's rights leader and member of Parliament.

But she had enemies on many sides, including powerful warlords, whom she did not hesitate to criticize. She famously remarked of her fellow legislators: "Our Parliament is a collection of lords. Warlords, drug lords, crime lords."

By Sunday evening, there was no claim of responsibility for the attack. Reached by telephone earlier in the day, a spokesman for the Taliban, Zabiullah Mujahid, said he did not know whether the insurgents had carried out the attack, but he said he was checking.

The attack occurred in front of a private university, alongside Darulaman Road, one of Kabul's widest and busiest boulevards. The attacker, driving a Toyota Corolla, detonated his explosives alongside Ms. Barakzai's armored vehicle as she headed to a session in Parliament, the authorities said.

Two male passers-by and a female university student were killed, said the spokesman for the Kabul police, Hashmatullah Stanikzai.

Video footage posted online by an Afghan television station showed Ms. Barakzai emerging from the back seat of her armored vehicle after the blast and walking away unaided. She was taken to the hospital used by the nation's intelligence service. A member of Parliament who visited Ms. Barakzai at the hospital, Hillai Ershad, said her colleague had suffered burns to her face and hand. She was expected to be discharged shortly, the authorities said Sunday night.

"I survived because of my people's prayers," Ms. Barakzai told Reuters in a telephone interview on Sunday.

Ms. Barakzai, who is a strong supporter of President Ashraf Ghani, has been widely talked about as a likely candidate to join his government as the next women's affairs minister, or as a presidential adviser on women's affairs.

A former journalist, she is a familiar presence on Afghan television, often sitting for interviews. She has actively campaigned against the practice of Afghan men marrying multiple wives. Her husband, who runs an oil company and was an unsuccessful candidate for Parliament, took a second wife without consulting her.

In an interview in September, Ms. Barakzai said that Mr. Ghani would bring an ambitious agenda and a sense of bracing change to the presidency, in contrast with what she described as the compromises and cronyism that had weakened his predecessor, Hamid Karzai.

"He's a soft, constructive dictator," she said, referring to Mr. Ghani. "I like it. This has been missing too long."

But she also worried that Western governments, seeking to stabilize the fragile national government, would pressure Mr. Ghani to go easy on the warlords she had often railed against.

Reporting was contributed by Rod Nordland, Ahmad Shakib, Jawad Sukhanyar and Fazl Rahman Muzhary from Kabul, Afghanistan, and Declan Walsh from London.