Explosion of Afghan's warlord's weapons kills 28

A warlord’s secret weapons cache exploded in a remote Afghan village today, flattening nearby houses and a mosque and killing at least 28 people in what appeared to be the deadliest accident of its kind since the fall of the Taliban.

The blast highlighted the dangers in a country still awash with old arms piled up in a quarter-century of fighting, and the immense task facing Afghan and UN officials trying to disarm commanders wary of rivals and the country’s US-backed government.

The weapons were stored in Bashgah, a farming hamlet in the mountains of Baghlan province, 75 miles north of the capital, Kabul. Officials said it was unclear what triggered the blast, which occurred at about in the early hours, and left at least another 13 people injured.

The director of Baghlan’s only hospital said 11 of the injured were admitted within hours and told of being blwn off their feet as they walked home from morning prayer – apparently at the mosque next to the commander’s house.

“One man told me there was a huge explosion and then all he can remember is the thick smoke,” Mohammed Yusuf Faiez said, from the provincial capital, Pul-e-Khumri.

Of the six men and five women at the hospital, two were in serious condition, Faiez said. One ambulance was sent to the scene, he said.

Interior Ministry spokesman Latfullah Mashal said the cache was hidden in a bunker under the house of a warlord and the former commander of a militia brigade named Jalal Bashgah, apparently to conceal it from the UN disarmament programme.

Baghlan Police chief Gen Fazeluddin Ayar said Basghah’s house was among half a dozen flattened along with the mosque and that eight of the commander’s family were killed or injured. However, Bashgah was not at home at the time, Ayar said.

Officials initially reported that Bashgah was believed to have been killed and more than 70 people injured, but Ayar said police sent to the village, located deep in a mountain valley, found that the number hurt was much lower.

Ayar said the cache included explosives and rockets from ”a long time ago.” He said the commander had given up only a portion of his weapons to the United Nations, which has so far demobilised more than 50,000 former militiamen.

That programme as well as the disposal activities of US and NATO troops, who report the discovery of weapons caches almost daily, have rounded up thousands of tons of weapons, many left over from the resistance against occupying Soviet forces during the 1980s.

But Peter Babbington, head of the UN programme, said there were still “many, many thousands of tons” more scattered across the country. While the exact quantity was uncertain, there were sure to be more accidents, he said.

“These guys think they can store it forever and that it’ll be as good as the day it came off the production line, but it isn’t. It deteriorates and it becomes volatile,” Babbington said. “We’re surveying the known sites, but new sites come up every day.”

Collection efforts were currently focused on the north, but in cities such as Mazar-e-Sharif and Herat rather than the remote valleys of Baghlan, he said.

Accidents with mines and old ordnance have inflicted casualties on an endless stream of Afghans, including children and farmers, who lose arms and legs while playing along roadsides or simply working their land, and poor Afghans killed trying to recycle gunpowder from rockets for quarrying.

Foreign troops worried that the weapons will be used against them by militants maintaining a three-year insurgency, have also fallen victim.

Before today’s accident, the most deadly reported incident had befallen the US military, which lost eight of its soldiers in January 2004 when a cache of arms they were preparing for disposal exploded prematurely.