Where are the bodies?

2002-07-04 15:16

Bagram - US investigators were looking on Thursday for the graves of scores of Afghans reportedly killed in a US air attack after they found blood, but no bodies at one of several sites hit in the raid, a US spokesperson said.

"We are in the process of negotiations (with locals)," the chief US military spokesperson in Afghanistan, Lieutenant Colonel Roger King, told reporters at Bagram airbase, north of Kabul.

He said one problem hampering the investigation was "cultural differences" over viewing the bodies, which villagers have said were buried or taken away by relatives. Muslim custom requires that the dead be buried quickly and post-mortem exhumations are rare in staunchly Muslim Afghanistan.

A joint US-Afghan probe team is in the Dehrawad district of Uruzgan province investigating charges by Afghan officials that 40 civilians were killed and as many as 100 wounded when US aircraft attacked what they believed were hostile anti-aircraft guns in the area.

But in a tour on Wednesday of the area, in central Afghanistan, they saw neither bodies nor graves, the Pentagon and journalists accompanying the team said.

US investigators questioned absence of corpses

"They saw some evidence of damage - not determined caused by what - and they saw some blood," spokesperson Victoria Clarke said in Washington on Wednesday night. "They did not see any bodies or any graves."

Reporters with the team - US military and State Department officials and seven Afghan officials - said the US investigators repeatedly questioned the absence of any corpses.

"There should be more blood," they were reported to have asked, according to a pool report. "Where are the bodies?"

A doctor at a clinic in Dehrawad told the team that 96 people wounded in the attack had been treated there, three of whom had died from their injuries, King said.

Investigations were continuing in Dehrawad on Thursday.

"They are going to be there all day today. Their intention is to remain there overnight," King said.

Afghan leaders are furious at the reported deaths. President Hamid Karzai and Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah have told the US forces to take "stronger measures" to avoid civilian casualties.

In the first public protest against the nine-month US-led military campaign to wipe out Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters in their Central Asian country, some 50 Afghans rallied in Kabul on Thursday, warning anti-US sentiment would rise if there were any more "friendly fire" deaths.

"The Afghans, who have had enough of war and bloodshed in the past 23 years, will seriously react if it is repeated," one of the organisers, Abdul Qayum Shaban, said.

Witnesses in Dehrawad told reporters they saw US aircraft in the sky moments before a barrage of bombs and gunfire hit pre-wedding celebrations on Sunday night.

US planes may have mistaken celebratory gunfire

The groom, who was in another village with his fiancee at the time of the incident, said 25 members of his extended family were killed.

Clarke said the team spent several hours in the village where most of the civilian casualties were reported. The attack came during a US-Afghan military operation in the area on Sunday and Monday.

The team examined a compound five kilometres from Dehrawad, where they saw blood stains, bullet-scarred walls and a large hole in the roof of one building, which villagers said was caused by a US AC-130 gunship, according to the pool report.

But Clarke said it was not clear what caused the damage in the village.

"Something happened," she said. "It's not been reported to us what caused it."

Afghan officials have said US planes may have mistaken celebratory gunfire at the pre-wedding party for hostile fire.

On Thursday King repeated the US military account that coalition aircraft attacked six targets near the village where the celebrations were being held, after they were fired on.

"The C-130 engaged six different locations...The particular targets they were looking for were not in the village," he said.

"The village itself was not the subject of a pre-planned target...The focus of the operation was not to target that village.

"Now if the aircrafts received fire from within the village, the location of fire would become a target."

On Wednesday, Marine General Peter Pace, vice chairperson of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, said a US AC-130 gunship had come under anti-aircraft artillery fire and had retaliated at six individual locations. - Sapa-AFP

- SAPA