Afghans Accused of Bombing Pakistan Villages, Killing 35

Afghan warplanes bombed two Pakistani border villages Thursday, killing 35 people and injuring 200 others, Pakistani officials said.

Afghanistan did not immediately comment on the report.

About 3 million Afghan refugees live in Pakistan, which aids Afghan Muslim guerrillas seeking to overthrow Afghanistan’s Soviet-backed Communist government. Many guerrillas and refugees live along the Pakistani border.

The Pakistani officials said the dead and wounded included both Afghans and Pakistanis, but they gave no breakdown.

The raids came on the second day of a new round of U.N.-sponsored indirect peace talks in Geneva between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Pakistani government officials said eight Afghan planes attacked the Pakistani villages of Saigai and Ghulam Mohammed near the town of Miram Shah, about 190 miles west-southwest of Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad.

24 Bombs Dropped

The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the warplanes dropped 24 bombs on the villages in two sorties. The villages are three miles from the border with Afghanistan.

“It was the busy morning hour in the bazaars in two villages, which resulted in a large number of dead and injured,” one official said.

Hospital officials, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said 120 people injured in the raids were admitted to the government hospital in Miram Shah. Some of them were critically injured, the sources said.

Doctors said another 80 injured were sent to Peshawar, about 100 miles north of the bombing sites.

The bombings destroyed about 150 shops and houses in the bazaar areas of the two villages, the government officials said. Dozens of camels, donkeys and cattle also died in the raids.

The bombings were among the worst since Muslim rebels took up their fight against the Afghan government after an April, 1978, military coup by Afghanistan’s Marxist party.