Up to 10 people in South Sudan, with three children included have been killed after mistaking unexploded ordnance for scrap metal, according to an official on Friday.
The commissioner of Jur River county, James Bak, confirmed Thursday’s accident in Western Bahr el Ghazal stating that two other children were injured. In addition to his statement, people in Jebel-Mille area had been gathering mangoes when they came across the unexploded ordnance and assumed it was metal scrap. They started collecting it for sale when it exploded.
“It killed seven women and three children,” Bak stated.The wounded children’s mothers were among those killed.Mines and other unexploded ordnance remain a major problem in South Sudan, which is recovering from a five-year civil war that ended in 2018. 
More than 5,000 South Sudanese have been killed or injured by land mines and unexploded ordnance since 2004, according to the United Nations Mine Action Service. Hundreds of victims have been children.The local commissioner urged locals not to handle unknown objects but report them instead.
