KABUL, June 26, (Agencies): An eight-year-old Afghan girl was killed when a bag of explosives given to her by Taleban insurgents exploded as she approached a police outpost in southern Afghanistan, the government said on Sunday.
“The insurgents handed over a bag with a homemade bomb to an eight-year-old girl and asked her to take it to police forces,” the Ministry of Interior said in a statement.
“As the girl was getting close to the police, it exploded and killed the girl.”
There have been occasional cases of insurgents using female bombers — or more commonly of fighters dressing as women in head-to-toe burqa coverings — but the use of children had been almost unheard of until recently.
In May, Afghan police paraded four boys, all under 13, they said had been recruited as bombers from their homes in neighbouring Pakistan. One of the boys said they had been told they would live through the suicide attacks.
The Taleban later denied they were recruiting children to carry out suicide attacks.
The latest incident took place in the Char Chino district of Uruzgan province in southern Afghanistan. There were no police casualties.
The death comes as four NATO troops were killed over the past two days, including two Spanish soldiers who died on Sunday after a homemade bomb exploded in western Afghanistan.
The toll from a suicide car bombing at an Afghan hospital rose to 38 Sunday, a local official said, days after President Barack Obama said 10,000 US troops would leave the country this year.
Many of the victims in Logar province, about 75 kms (45 miles) south of the capital Kabul, were women and children who had been at the hospital’s maternity ward, and as many as 50 people were also wounded.
The devastating attack came just weeks before international forces are due to start handing over responsibility for security to their Afghan counterparts in seven areas of the country.
An eyewitness described horrific scenes of victims on fire and body parts scattered in all directions after a sports utility vehicle (SUV) blew up in the remote district of Azra, close to the border with Pakistan, on Saturday.
Following initial official confusion over the death toll, local officials said Sunday the figures of those killed and injured had risen overnight.
Provincial health director Mohammad Zaref Nayebkhail said that 38 people were killed and 50 wounded.
“There are differences in figures given by other government sources because soon after the blast, villagers took some of the dead bodies home immediately and they were not counted,” he said.
“Some of the bodies were later taken out of the collapsed rooms and debris. Some of the wounded also died later. We have counted all of them.”
District police chief Bakhtiar Gul put the death toll at 33, with another 45 wounded.
One man who lives near the hospital, Abdul Rahman, told AFP he lost seven relatives in the explosion.
“Seven members of my family including three women and two children went to that hospital,” he said in tears. “I was at home, then I heard a big explosion. When I rushed to the site, I saw many dead and injured people.
“Many of them were burning, on fire. There were body parts everywhere. My family is dead, I can’t find them, they are under the rubble.”
The Taleban denied they were behind the attack, with spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid saying: “We condemn this attack on a hospital... whoever has done this wants to defame the Taleban.”
UN special representative Staffan de Mistura called the blast “despicable”.
“Much of the damage was in the maternity ward of the hospital, and many of those killed and injured were women and children,” he said in a statement.