KABUL, April 11 (Xinhua) -- Six children lost their lives and 15 others sustained injures as a rocket fired from unknown locations slammed into a packed primary school in Assadabad, the provincial capital of eastern Kunar province, Tuesday morning, local officials said.

    "A BM-12 type missile fired by unknown militants hit Salar-bagh primary school at 9:30 a.m., killing six pupils and wounding 15 others," provincial interior official Mohammad Hasan Salahi told Xinhua.

    Parents of the ill-fated children had rushed to the school, which is just about 400 meters away from a U.S. military base in the province, to identify and pick up the victims, he added.

    Although the primary educational institutions have occasionally been targeted by suspected militants over the past one year, it is the first time that a school is directly targeted in the militancy-plagued eastern and southern region where hundreds of Taliban-linked militants are said to have hidden.

    No one has claimed responsible for the fatal incident and the militants have yet to make any comment. Kunar is a former stronghold of Taliban and Hekmatyar-led militants in east Afghanistan. Enditem