At least ten people were killed on Friday when a car went off outside a sports stadium in southern Afghanistan, officials said. The blast happened in Lashkar Gah city as spectators were leaving a wrestling match at the stadium, Helmand provincial governor spokesman Omar Zwak told AFP. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack. The office of Afghan president Ashraf Ghani issued a statement condemning the "brutal terrorist attack." Helmand police spokesman Salam Afghan told AFP that at least 10 people had been killed and 35 others wounded in the attack. But Zwak put the death toll even higher at 15 dead and 45 wounded, including children. "The suicide bomber detonated his car bomb as spectators were leaving the stadium," Zwak said. "The bomber wanted to go inside the stadium but he was identified by the police and he detonated himself." The police spokesman confirmed the blast was caused by a car bomb. Photos posted on Twitter purportedly of the explosion showed a huge fire and a thick plume of black smoke rising into the sky. The Italian NGO Emergency said four dead and 35 wounded had been taken to its hospital in the city. Agha Mohammad, a 25-year-old shopkeeper from Lashkar Gah, was among the spectators leaving the match when the blast happened. "Four of my family members were martyred and three others were wounded," a sobbing Mohammad told AFP at the Emergency hospital. Helmand is mostly controlled by the Taliban, which is under growing pressure to take up the Afghan governments offer of peace talks to end the 16-year war. So far it has given only a muted response. The attack caps a bloody few days in war-torn Afghanistan. Taliban and ISIS militants have ramped up attacks across the country in recent weeks even before the official start of the spring fighting season. On January 27, a Taliban attacker drove an ambulance filled with explosives into the heart of the city, killing at least 103 people and wounding as many as 235. The Taliban claimed the ambulance attack, as well as an attack a week earlier in which militants stormed a luxury hotel in Kabul, killing 22 people, including 14 foreigners, and setting off a 13-hour battle with security forces. Despite calls for the Taliban to sit down with the Afghan government, the group -- which has been resurgent since the withdrawal of US-led NATO combat troops at the end of 2014 -- appears to have few reasons to negotiate. In October, insurgents controlled or influenced nearly half of Afghanistans districts -- double the percentage in 2015, the US governments office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction said in January. Over the same period, the watchdog said, the number of districts under Afghan government control or influence fell to its lowest level since December 2015.