Nine children were killed in southeastern Afghanistan by the explosion of a mine dating from the war with the Soviet Union in the 1980s. The children killed in Geru district were five girls and four boys, aged four to ten.
Fatal accidents with explosive devices are frequent in Afghanistan, whose territory has been ravaged by more than forty years of conflict. The Soviet army invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, only to withdraw in February 1989, at the end of an extremely deadly conflict of more than nine years.