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Blast near Afghan border kills four

PESHAWAR: A powerful blast on the Pakistan side of a border crossing with Afghanistan on Tuesday killed at least four people and injured 18, police and local officials said, revising down an earlier toll of seven dead.

Iftikhar Khan, the local area administrator, told Reuters that the explosion behind a small grocery shop at Torkham, a historic border point for travellers between Afghanistan and Pakistan, killed three Afghan girls and a Pakistani resident.

He said earlier reports by the state media and other officials that seven people died were incorrect. Most of the 18 injured people were Afghan girls.

He said the morning explosion might have been caused by unexploded arsenal brought over from Afghanistan in the form of scrap.

The official APP news agency, which put the death toll at seven, said authorities were also investigating the possibility that the blast was caused by an explosion of a gas cylinder at the shop.

Khan said the site was used to store metal scrap brought from Afghanistan, explaining the high casualty of Afghan girls.

After the blast, Pakistani security personnel quickly closed the border gate -- about a 100 meters (yards) away -- stopping people from crossing into Afghanistan.

The crossing, about 50 km (30 miles) west of Peshawar, capital of Pakistan's North West Frontier province, is also used by Afghan refugees returning home under a U.N. repatriation programme that resumed for the current year on Monday.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees moved 465 people from Peshawar by trucks in the first major repatriation this year of refugees to their war-torn country. Another batch of 350 refugees is due to return on Wednesday. Pakistan has been home to more than three million Afghan refugees who fled during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. Some 1.5 million still await repatriation. -Reuters