Kandahar - A roadside bomb believed to have been planted on a road by Taliban militants struck a bus Tuesday in southern Afghanistan, killing 30 passengers and wounding 39 other civilians, officials said. Two other roadside bombs in eastern and southern Afghanistan killed six more civilians.
The latest incident involved the bus travelling from the western province of Herat to Kandahar city when it was blown up in the Maiwand district of Kandahar province, said Zelmai Ayoubi, spokesman for Kandahar's governor.
The Afghan Interior Ministry said in a statement that the blast killed 30 civilians - 10 children, seven women and 13 men - in the village of Ali Shir. It said 39 other civilians were injured.
Ayoubi had earlier said that 12 civilians were killed and 15 were wounded.
He blamed "enemies of Afghanistan and Islam" for the attack, a term often used by Afghan officials to describe Taliban insurgents.
President Hamid Karzai condemned the attack as "unforgivable" in a statement released by his office and said that such attacks would not stop Afghans from rebuilding their country.
Also in Kandahar, a roadside bomb hit a civilian vehicle in the Sarposa area of Kandahar city Monday afternoon, killing five civilians - two women and three men, the Interior Ministry said in a separate statement Tuesday.
A woman was killed and another was injured when they stepped on a bomb in the Spinghar district of the eastern province of Nangarhar Tuesday, the statement said, adding that both women were working in a farm field when the incident occurred.
The Taliban's homemade bombs, which are intended for Afghan and NATO-led forces in the country, often kill or injurecivilians, who have borne the brunt of insurgent attacks in the past eight years since the fall of the Taliban's ultra-Islamic regime.
About 1,500 Afghan civilians were killed from January to August, up 20 per cent from the same period last year, according to a United Nations report. Around two-thirds of those were killed by insurgents while most of the other 30 per cent were killed by NATO airstrikes.
Roadside attacks have claimed the lives of more than three-quarters of the 370 foreign soldiers killed in Afghanistan this year, according to NATO officials.
