Kabul, Oct 26: At least 10 people were killed and two dozen wounded on Wednesday when a fuel truck supplying one of the largest US-run bases in Afghanistan erupted in flames after being bombed, an official said.
A magnet bomb stuck on the side of the civilian-operated tanker blasted a hole in the fuel truck.
"When people gathered around it to collect the pooling fuel, a bigger explosion took place," said Parwan provincial spokeswoman Roshna Khalid, who confirmed the truck was bound for NATO base Bagram north of Kabul.
It was not clear what caused the second explosion.
"Ten people are dead and 25 others injured," Parwan governor Basir Salangi told AFP, condemning the attack as "an act of terror".
A Parwan hospital spokesman said it received three dead and 35 injured. Khalid initially gave a toll of 50 dead or wounded.
Mud graves were dug at the roadside for the dead as residents flocked to inspect the charred remains of the truck and the wreckage of several cars and motorbikes caught in the blast, an AFP reporter at the scene said.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility. In northwest Pakistan, Taliban and other Islamist militants routinely blow up NATO tankers carrying fuel from the Arabian Sea to US-led troops in landlocked Afghanistan.
Parwan is expected to be part of a second wave of transition from NATO to Afghan control which President Hamid Karzai will announce at a regional conference in Istanbul on November 2.
Violence has increased in northern Afghanistan, but the region has been spared the worst fighting in the 10-year war, with most Taliban attacks concentrated on NATO and Afghan troops in the southern and eastern regions.
There appears to have been a spike in attacks in the north since last month's assassination of government peace broker Burhanuddin Rabbani, a former president and key leader in the ethnic Tajik and Uzbek Northern Alliance.
On Sunday, a suicide bomber targeted Interior Minister Bismullah Khan as he travelled through Parwan.
On October 15, four Taliban bombers killed two men at a US-run development base in the first suicide attack of the war in the province of Panjshir.
The interior minister is an ethnic Tajik former anti-Soviet commander who fought the Taliban alongside Afghanistan's northern hero Ahmad Shah Masood and was appointed to his cabinet post in June last year.
The Taliban, dominated by ethnic Pashtuns, have so far shown little willingness to talk peace despite various overtures by Western and Afghan brokers, 10 years since the US-led invasion ousted them from power.
Istanbul and another international conference in Bonn, Germany in December are aimed at stepping up efforts to end the conflict as Western voters tire of the long war that has cost billions of dollars and thousands of lives.
