Kabul: Suicide attacks involving as many as 14 bombers struck an Afghan city on Tuesday, and a motorcycle bomb exploded in a busy market in blasts that killed at least 46 people altogether, the year`s deadliest day for civilians in Afghanistan.
Most of those who died were out shopping for food to break the daily fast of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
The attacks in Nimroz province in the southwest and Kunduz in the north came during a campaign by Taliban insurgents and their allies to step up attacks as international troops hand over security responsibility to Afghan forces.
NATO plans to withdraw most of its troops by the end of 2014.
There were no claims of responsibility for any of the blasts.
At least 25 civilians and 11 police were killed in Nimroz when several men wearing suicide bomb vests detonated their explosives in different areas of the provincial capital of Zaranj, provincial police chief Musa Rasouli said.
Not all of the attackers were able to set off their bombs.
Police killed or captured several of them, officials said. One explosion mid-afternoon Tuesday went off outside a hospital near a busy market packed with people shopping for the feast at the end of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, which starts this weekend, officials said.
Nimroz Governor Abdul Karim Barawi said there were three blasts in the city, but accounts by officials differed amid the chaos in the remote area that has had relatively few insurgent attacks in the past year.
At least two attackers wearing suicide bomb vests and carrying weapons also attacked the governor`s compound but were killed by security forces before they could set off their explosives, Rasouli said.
Nimroz deputy police chief Abdul Majid Latifa said 14 bombers in all were involved in the plot, while Rasouli put the number at 11.
PTI
