03 May 2004	Monday	12 Rabi-ul-Awwal 1425

KABUL, May 2: At least 34 people died and scores more sustained severe burns on Sunday when a gas tanker exploded on a crucial road linking southern and north-western Afghanistan, officials said.

The gas laden truck blew up at about 2:30 pm in the bazaar of Azizabad, in Shindand district in the far south of western Herat province, provincial police chief Zia-Ulldin Mahmodi said.

Although the exact cause of the accident is unknown, officials said the blast was caused by careless welding near the tanker. "The truck explodes and the result is 31 people killed, 35 injured," Mahmodi said, speaking from Herat Public Health Hospital where many of the injured were taken after the blast in a shopping district.

"Probably half of the injured people will also die as their injuries are very bad, they have 100 per cent burns." Some 31 people had died at the scene while another three had succumbed to their injuries after arriving at Herat hospital, a humanitarian worker said from the hospital where dozens of people had gathered for news on their relatives.

Twenty-six people were being treated for burns while other casualties were being dealt with at a clinic in Shindand, spokeswoman for French non-governmental organization Medecins du Monde France, Valerie Gentner, said.

Gentner said the NGO had brought some medicine to the hospital but, like most of Afghanistan's medical facilities, it was not equipped to deal with the emergency. "I can see around eight or nine casualties in the same room," she said. "They are groaning. We are have brought some drugs but they are still lacking bedsheets and bandages."

A statement from the office of President Hamid Karzai confirmed that at least 25 people had died and more than 40 were injured in the tragedy. Karzai said he was "deeply saddened by the news of the terrible accident caused by a fuel explosion at a gas station in the district of Shindand, Herat, which resulted in the death of at least 25 and the wounding of over 40 people."

A spokesman for the Herat government, Qarim Massoom, said that the accident was caused by welding near the tanker in Shindand, which is about 100 kilometres south of Herat. "In the incident between 50 and 100 people are killed and injured," Massoom added. -AFP