A massive bomb blast Thursday in central Afghanistan killed 25 people including 13 primary school students, destroying shops and scattering pieces of the vehicle that carried the explosives over a huge area, police said. Another bombing in the south killed two NATO soldiers. The central Afghanistan bomb was detonated in an overturned truck carrying timber, killing 21 civilians and four policemen in Logar province, south of Kabul, ministry spokesman Zemerai Bashary said. At least 13 of those killed were children from nearby schools, said Kamaluddin Zadran, a provincial official. Another two schoolchildren were wounded and three others are still missing, Zadran said. Provincial police chief Mustafa Khan said the truck had overturned late Wednesday as it traveled the main road from Logar to Kabul. After police arrived to clear the road on Thursday morning, militants apparently remotely detonated a bomb planted in the back of the truck among the timber, he said. The power of the blast in Mohammad Agha district, close to shops that collect milk from farmers, sent truck pieces flying more than a mile (2 kilometers), said a second police official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media. AP Television News footage from the scene showed the explosion left a huge crater in the road. People collected the remains of the dead, wrapping them in white and colored shrouds. Nearby mud houses had collapsed. Twisted and charred remains of a police vehicle caught in the blast were loaded onto a truck. The roadside and suicide bombings are the militants' weapon of choice in Afghanistan. The number of such attacks have spiked this year, as thousands of additional American troops joined the fight. Majority of the victims in such attacks have been civilians. Meanwhile, two NATO soldiers were killed in a roadside bombing Wednesday in southern Afghanistan, the military alliance said in a statement. The statement, issued Thursday, did not identify the location of the blast or the nationalities of the victims.
