Nepal explosion: Four children killed in blast after playing with abandoned bomb, police say

Bomb thought to be leftover from the country’s civil war

Incident took place in a forest in Nepal's Ropal district (Vishal Acharya)

A blast in a remote part of Nepal has killed four children, police said on Friday, with suspicion it was caused by old ordnance left over from a decade-long Maoist insurgency.

The children, aged from five to 13, had taken cattle to graze in a forest in the northwestern district of Rolpa on Thursday when they found a device and played with it, probably mistaking it for a toy, said police official Shanta Kumar KC.

“It may have been abandoned during the conflict,” he said. Authorities were investigating.

The Nepalese Civil War began with the Maoist rebellion in Rolpa in 1996 and caused 17,000 deaths before ending with a peace deal in 2006.

The former rebels are now part of the ruling Nepal Communist Party.

Unexploded ordnance from the war still causes casualties.

Reuters