The New Nation - Internet Edition

AFP, Kabul

A suicide attack in Afghanistan this week killed 59 children and five teachers, the education ministry said, taking the death toll to 75 in the deadliest attack in the insurgency-hit country.

Six lawmakers and five bodyguards were also killed in the blast on Tuesday in the northern province of Baghlan.

"We have got 59 school children, aged from eight to 18, and five teachers killed in that blast," education ministry spokesman Zuhor Afghan told AFP.

The children had gathered to welcome a visiting delegation of parliamentarians to a sugar factory outside the town of Pul-i-Khumri, about 150 kilometres (90 miles) north of Kabul.

The Taliban, behind a wave of suicide attacks in Afghanistan as part of an extremist insurgency launched after they were ousted from power six years ago, have denied involvement in the blast.

Five of the parliamentarians and five bodyguards were buried in a state funeral in Kabul on Thursday attended by 2,500 people and 1,000 police and soldiers, after three days of national mourning were declared.

Afghan said Education Minister Mohammad Hanif Atmar had, in the wake of the blast, reissued a ban on children being assembled to welcome visitors to functions because of concerns about their safety.

"The students were already banned from attending those kind of ceremonies," Afghan said.

"But after this attack, the minister has ordered again that no-one can force any student to participate in those kind of ceremonies any more," he said.

Special prayer services would be held in Kabul and all provinces in the next few days to remember the children and teachers, the spokesman said.

But the government had decided against ceremonies in schools because it might "spread fear", he said.

"If we have such a memorial ceremony within the schools, it will have a bad impact on the students," he said.

Top government officials were expected to attend prayer services in Kabul later Friday.

The toll from the blast has been difficult to pin down with various officials issuing different numbers.

A health ministry official in Kabul, Ahmad Shah Shokohmand, said earlier Friday that 64 people were killed, four of whom had died in hospital from their wounds.

"The latest figures are a result of our investigations based on the count of the graves in the area," Shokohmand told AFP. He said 81 people were wounded.

The police chief of Baghlan province, Abdul Rahman Sayedkhili, said however that 61 people were dead and 95 wounded. Sayedkhili said a man was arrested at the site of the attack, a day the after blast, because he was behaving suspiciously. He had been sent to Kabul for questioning.

It was Afghanistan's worst such attack, claiming more victims than a June suicide bombing that killed 35 people in the heart of Kabul.

About 700 of the mourners at Thursday's state funeral shouted slogans and waved banners after the burials, demanding arrests.

There was also a demonstration by about 150 university students in Mazar-i-Sharif who shouted slogans including, "Death to tyrants, terrorists and the Taliban."