At least 19 Afghan soldiers and civilians were killed when an ammunition dump blew up yesterday, unleashing a chain of explosions that spread damage across a wide area, witnesses and officials said.
A further 15 soldiers who were on duty at the depot on the outskirts of the town of Spin Boldak in southern Afghanistan were missing, a senior local official, Syed Fazaluddin Agha, said.
Agha and other officials said a rocket fired by al-Qaeda fugitives had hit the depot in the town, near the border with Pakistan, but another said it was too early to say what caused the blast.
"Maybe it had been due to some accident," another official said by phone from Spin Boldak.
The roar of exploding ammunition could be heard 20km away in the Pakistan frontier town of Chaman, where Afghans arriving from Spin Boldak said the blast had destroyed the roofs of houses for 2km around the site.
Agha said the dead comprised 12 civilians, among them four women and three children, and seven soldiers.
"I thought it was a continuous earthquake," an Afghan who arrived in Chaman yesterday, said.
The UN World Food Program said a projectile set off in the blast hit a warehouse it uses to store food for distribution to Afghans.
"Two huge storage tents caught fire and some edible oil supplies have been damaged. Between 600 and 800 tonnes of wheat supplies were saved," WFP spokesman Khaled Mansour said.
He said six Afghans living near the dump had been injured in their homes, one of them a WFP worker. Agha said 25 vehicles had been destroyed, five of them from the UN refugee agency UNHCR.
Afghan officials said the ammunition depot had been set up at a former Muslim religious seminary during operations against fugitive Taliban and al-Qaeda militants in southern Afghanistan.
Muhammad Sharif, brother of Governor Gul Agha in the Afghan city of Kandahar, said the depot had been hit by a rocket apparently fired by fugitive al-Qaeda militants.
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