WASHINGTON, Nov 29: The US military on Thursday suspended parachute drops of large containers of humanitarian supplies into Afghanistan after a package crashed into a house and killed an Afghan woman, the Pentagon said.

As US warplanes bombed Taliban and al Qaeda targets in that country for a 54th day, officials stressed that drops of thousands of small individual daily food packages would continue while big container deliveries of wheat and other items were halted and investigated.

“Obviously it was very unfortunate and we deeply regret the loss of life,” Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke told reporters when asked about Wednesday night’s accident involving a drop of wheat, blankets and cold weather equipment northeast of the city of Mazar-i-Sharif.

“Central Command for the time being has stopped these particular deliveries while they look into whether there is something wrong that they can and should address,” she said.

On the military front, Clarke said about 1,000 US Marines were now at an airfield not far from the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar. Hundreds of Marines began landing there on Sunday to increase military pressure on the Taliban and al Qaeda network of fugitive Osama bin Laden from anti-Taliban Afghan opposition groups.

Clarke also said the Pentagon was investigating reports that ethnic Pashtun fighters might have executed 160 captured Taliban last week in southern Afghanistan despite attempts by US troops to stop the killings.

The Pentagon reported late on Wednesday that two Afghan civilians — a woman and child — were killed when the US shipment of wheat, blankets and cold weather equipment fell on a house 120 miles (193 km) northeast of Mazar-i-Sharif.

But Clarke told reporters later information indicated that the child had survived the accident.

US military C-17 cargo planes based in Germany on Wednesday also dropped another 34,440 small humanitarian daily meal ration pouches into Afghanistan, mostly near Mazar-i-Sharif. Those packages are designed to flutter individually to the ground without danger to hundreds of thousands of civilian refugees displaced within the rugged country.

The drop brought to more than 2 million the number of such pouches dropped since the air war against the Taliban and bin Laden’s al Qaeda network began on Oct. 7.

The plastic packs, which unlike the larger packages of supplies are dropped without parachutes, contain enough food for one person for one day.

The US Central Command, based in Tampa, Florida, stressed in a statement that “great time and care” was put into selecting sites for delivery of humanitarian assistance.

“US Central Command will examine the details of how this tragic accident occurred and will put in place appropriate corrective actions,” the statement said.—Reuters