| The explosion was in the village of Bajgah, near the town of Khenjan, some 120km (80 miles) north of Kabul.
An interior ministry spokesman said the whole area around the munitions dump had been destroyed.
He said the dump belonged to a former militia commander who said he had disarmed under a government scheme.
Investigators
The spokesman, Lutfallah Mashal, told the BBC the ammunition belonged to Jalal Bajgah.
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Afghanistan
Police chief in Baghlan, Gen Fazeluddin Ayar, told the Associated Press news agency that the weapons were stored in a bunker under Mr Bajgah's home compound.
Gen Ayar said the commander was not at home at the time but that eight of the commander's family were killed or injured.
Mr Bajgah was supposed to have disarmed under a nationwide programme aimed at removing all weapons from the control of private militias.
"He had secretly retained some of his weapons. We didn't know about this," Mr Mashal said.
The exact cause of the explosion is not yet known. Investigators are already at the site, police said.
The director of Baghlan's only hospital said some of the injured had spoken of being blown off their feet as they returned from morning prayers.
Massive stockpiles
The ammunition included artillery and tank shells, as well as rocket-propelled grenades and smaller ammunition.
The country still has massive stockpiles of weapons and ammunition left from almost 25 years of war.
The BBC's Andrew North in Kabul says the explosion will be an embarrassment to the government and its disarmament scheme and it may be that there are many commanders who continue to hold weapons.
Peter Babbington, the head of the UN-run disarmament campaign, the Afghan New Beginnings Programme, told the BBC it was "a regrettable incident, but sadly an inevitable incident".
"There is still a lack of openness on the part of some commanders as to what they still have in their arsenals," he said.
The process of collecting heavy weapons and disarming individual militia soldiers is due to finish next month.
But Mr Babbington said "that will not clear the battlefield that is Afghanistan".
The disarmament campaign, started 20 months ago, has resulted in 45,000 men giving up their guns.
It is unclear how many private soldiers there are, but the UN scheme began with the target of disarming 60,000 of them. |
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