KABUL: Taliban guerrillas attacked a district headquarters in Afghanistan’s Ghazni province on Thursday, killing its administrator along with at least 14 others, officials said.

The pre-dawn attack on Khwaja Omari, one of the few safe districts in the province, involved scores of militants who burned down the district building after the attack 120 km to the southwest of Kabul.

Interior Ministry officials said that apart from Ali Dost Shams, the district chief, 14 other security forces were killed in the attack, but Arif Rahmani, an MP from the province, and Nasir Ahmad Faqiri, a member of the provincial council, put the loss of civilian officials and security forces at 30.

The attack is the bloodiest in a single incident for weeks in Afghanistan, which has been caught up in decades of violence.

The Taliban denied local official reports that 50 of the assailants had been killed after the arrival of government reinforcements.

Earlier on Thursday, the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) reported an increase in the number of civilian casualties  from Taliban attacks as well as Afghan and foreign troops in the first three months of this year compared to the same period last year.

Consistent with trends observed in 2017, the report noted that civilian casualties attributed to pro-government forces in the first quarter of 2018 reduced by 13 percent to 407 civilian casualties.

“All parties to the conflict in Afghanistan must do everything in their power to protect civilians from harm,” said Ingrid Hayden, the secretary-general’s deputy special representative for Afghanistan.

“Afghan civilians continue to suffer, caught in the conflict, in ways that are preventable; this must stop now,” she said in a statement.