KABUL, 3 May 2005 — A warlord’s secret weapons cache exploded in a remote Afghan village yesterday, 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 Taleban.
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, 125 kilometers north of the capital, Kabul. Officials said it was unclear what triggered the blast, which occurred at about 6 a.m. 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 blown 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 told The Associated Press by telephone 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 program.
Baghlan police chief Gen. Fazeluddin Ayar said Bashgah’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 told AP.
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 of 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 demobilized more than 50,000 former militiamen.
That program 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 program, 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.
