A series of powerful explosions tore through a local army munitions depot and destroyed international aid buildings in southern Afghanistan on Thursday, officials said, with one aid worker putting the death toll from the blasts at 32.
The exact casualty figure was initially impossible to determine because local authorities gave conflicting accounts as to the death toll, with one offical saying no-one had died.
Aid workers and local officials said a series of blasts, which started at midnight, destroyed a munitions depot belonging to Kandahar governor, Gul Agha, at Spin Boldak just 10km from the Pakistani border.
The blasts also destroyed buildings used by the World Food Programme (WFP) and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) while the doors and windows of other aid group offices were blown out.
”A new figure gives 32 dead and 70 injured, according to local authorities in Spin Boldak,” an employee of a foreign aid organisation here said on condition of anonymity.
However officials in the main southern city of Kandahar, some 100km to the north-west, said no-one had died.
”According to our reports nobody has been killed. There were three people buried under the rubble whom we recovered alive,” a representative for Gul Agha, Khaled Pashtoon, said.
”We’re investigating to find out the cause of the explosion. We don’t know if it was deliberate or accidental,” Pashtoon said, adding that a full report would be completed later Friday.
A second official in Kandahar said some people had been wounded but ”nobody has been killed”.
But over the border in Pakistan’s southwest Baluchistan province, Afghan consular official Habiullah Allah Yar said at least three people were killed.
”According to our report three people were killed and around 20 others injured in a series of blasts which apparently were triggered by an explosion in a munitions depot,” Yar said.
A World Food Program representative in the Afghan capital, Alejandro Chicheri, said the munitions depot was completely destroyed.
”The first explosion, the origin of which is unknown, occurred just after midnight and more explosions followed until 4am, sparking an enormous fire,” Chicheri said.
He said the blasts also destroyed nearby buildings used by the WFP and the UNHCR.
The WFP’s representative in Pakistan, Khaled Mansour, said one WFP worker was slightly injured while three WFP offices were destroyed and a warehouse storing desperately-needed food supplies for refugees was damaged.
The Afghan employee was slightly injured when shrapnel from the blast hit one of the organisation’s key warehouses, Mansour said.
”Rockets or shrapnel flying from the depot hit a few places including a World Food Program warehouse,” he said.
”It’s our main transitional warehouse in the south, it receives food from Pakistan which then goes to 60 000 displaced people in Spin Boldak and to Kandahar and Herat.
”It seems most of the food is intact, but two huge storage tents and three containers used as offices were destroyed.”
The tents were flattened by shockwaves from the blast, another WFP representative said.
A Pakistani border official said up to 16 people wounded by shrapnel had been brought over the border for treatment.
”The explosions were very powerful and may have caused massive casualties. There were many blasts,” the official said.
Spin Boldak lies some 100km southeast of the main southern city of Kandahar, a former stronghold of the hardline Taliban regime that was toppled late last year by the US-led bombing campaign. – Sapa-AFP