Two highway crashes in southeastern Afghanistan have killed a combined total of 50 people and injured 76, a government spokesman said Thursday. Women and children are among the casualties.

One was a collision between a passenger bus and an oil tanker on the Kabul-Kandahar highway late Wednesday, said Hafiz Omar, a spokesman for the governor of Ghazni province. The other was in a different area of the same highway, which connects the Afghan capital with the south.