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 while a Taliban commander was killed in the northern province of Kunduz and an Afghan-US military operation left dozens of insurgents dead in a western province, officials added.
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. 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 city, a roadside bomb hit a civilian vehicle in the Sarposa area 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.
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