AFGHANISTAN: A large explosion ripped through an Afghan construction warehouse in the eastern city of Jalalabad yesterday killing 25 people and injuring 80, government television reported.
It badly damaged 50 surrounding homes, some as far as 500 metres away, a local military commander, Mr Hazrat Ali, said, and sparked new fears of rising insecurity.
Rescuers spent several hours pulling bodies from the rubble, and the building continued to burn for at least two hours. All the dead were Afghans. "It was a tremendous explosion," Mr Ali said. "The number of dead will probably rise because of people dying in the hospital."
There were conflicting accounts last night of the cause of the blast at the Afghan Construction and Logistics Unit, a private road-building company. The senior government official in the province said the blast was an accident caused by explosives held at the warehouse which were used for road-building.
But Mr Ali believed a car-bomb was to blame. US military officials said initial reports from US officials in Jalalabad had blamed a truck-bomb.
The explosion happened on the western outskirts of the city, close to Nangarhar University and near the Darunta dam which supplies electricity to Jalalabad. Some damage was caused to the dam's electrical works.
Under the Taliban regime al-Qaida operatives ran a small training camp at the dam. The camp was based around a makeshift explosives laboratory, but the area was largely destroyed by heavy US bombing last October and November. Some Taliban and al-Qaida loyalists are thought to be hiding in the mountains around Jalalabad. The province has also long been an opium production centre.
Fighters loyal to al-Qaida and the Taliban have mounted small-scale attacks, particularly against US troops in recent weeks. A US soldier was shot in the chest on patrol in the south-east on Thursday.
There is little doubt that the security situation since the collapse of the Taliban has turned increasingly fragile. The Afghan Vice-President and governor of the eastern province of Nangarhar, Haji Abdul Qadir, was gunned down outside his Kabul office last month.