A US military investigation into the American air strikes on an Afghan village in August this year has concluded that the attack killed over 30 civilians, a figure far more than commanders there have acknowledged.
The military investigator's report found that more than 30 civilians not 5 to 7 as the military has long insisted died in the air strikes against a suspected Taliban compound in Azizabad in western Afghanistan on August 22, the New York Times reported.
The investigator, Brig Gen Michael W Callan of the Air Force, concluded that many more civilians, including women and children, had been buried in the rubble than the military had asserted, one of the military officials told the paper.
The air strikes have been the focus of sharp tensions between the Afghan government, which has said that 90 civilians died in the raid, and the American military, under Gen David D Mckiernan, the top American military commander in Afghanistan, which has repeatedly insisted that only a handful of civilians were killed.
While American commanders in Afghanistan have contended that 30 to 35 militants were killed in the raid, the new report concludes that many among that group were in fact civilians, the military officials were quoted by the Times as saying.
According to the report, fewer than 20 militants died in the raid, which was conducted jointly by American and Afghan forces, and in subsequent air strikes carried out by US warplanes in support of allied ground forces, the paper said.
The revised American estimate for civilian deaths in the operation remains far below the 90 that Afghan and UN officials have claimed, a figure that the Afghan government and the UN said was supported by cell phone photos, freshly dug grave sites and accounts of witnesses who saw dead bodies.
General Callan's findings ran counter to those of the earlier American investigations, the Times pointed out.
Earlier US Special Forces troops had conducted an initial battlefield review, including a building by building search, and four days after the strike, military investigators travelled to the vicinity of the raid, the paper said.
General Callan found that the people who conducted those investigations did not or could not do what was necessary to establish the full extent of the civilian killings, the military officials told the paper.
In contrast, they said, General Callan was able to review the scene of the air strikes more extensively. They said his team interviewed villagers, which the other military units had not done before, and examined new evidence, like cell phone videos and other images showing the bodies of women and children that were not available previously.
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