Suicide attackers, an ambush and a remotely controlled bomb killed up to 50 people across Afghanistan yesterday in the bloodiest day for civilians this year, officials said.

The bloodshed came as the nation prepared to celebrate the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, with many of the dead shopping in bazaars for Eid celebrations, police and local government officials said.

In the worst attack, three suicide bombers killed up to 36 people in the capital of Afghanistan’s southwestern Nimroz province on the border with Iran.

Hours later in northern Kunduz, a bomb attached to a motorcycle killed at least 10 people in the market of Archi district near the border with Tajikistan.

Then, in Badakhshan in the northeast, a district governor and four security personnel died in an ambush as they were driving to the provincial capital Faizabad, the provincial governor’s spokesman Abdul Maroof Rasekh told AFP.

Taliban insurgents, who have waged a decade-long war to topple the Western-backed government of President Hamid Karzai, were blamed for the attacks.

The attack on Zaranj city, capital of Nimroz, was the biggest in recent memory in the province and one of the deadliest in the country this year. At least 66 people were hurt.

Three suicide attackers out of an original 11 blew themselves up in separate areas of the city, one outside a hospital, police said.

“This was a group of 11 attackers who wanted to conduct simultaneous attacks across the city,” deputy provincial police chief Mujibullah Latifi told AFP.