Two Afghan children are believed to have been killed as they ran across a minefield to find food dropped from a US aircraft in western Afghanistan, a United Nations spokeswoman said here Thursday.
UN coordinator's office spokeswoman Stephanie Bunker said reports from aid workers in the city of Herat said two children died and three others were injured in the incident on Wednesday last week.
"Apparently children were running into a minefield in the Herat area to pick up the air-dropped food packages. Two of the children were reported killed and three were injured," she told a media briefing.
She also said UN mine clearers had destroyed unexploded US cluster bombs in 54 homes at a village near Herat. She said two nearby gardens and a mosque were also decontaminated.
"The staff did this at considerable personal risk in order to save the lives of the villagers," Bunker said.
"The local people of the area also helped by putting sandbags around the explosives."
She said deminers in the capital Kabul had destroyed two unexploded 500-pound US bombs, one in the "home of a family" and another lying on a main road leading north from the city.
"The work on removing unexploded bombs at Kabul airport is continuing and hopefully that airport will get up and running," she said.
The US-led air raids against Afghanistan's Taliban militia have complicated UN efforts to clear the country of millions of unexploded mines.
Afghanistan is the most heavily mined country in the world thanks to the 1979-89 Soviet invasion and subsequent civil wars.
A typical US cluster bomb is a 1,000-pound cannister, which releases more than 200 "bomblets" with six-millimetre diamond-patterned steel jackets.
An estimated 10 percent of the brightly-colored bomblets fail to detonate, posing a logistical headache and a deadly threat to civilians -- AFP
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