WASHINGTON, March 24: A dead battery in a positioning device led to the United States’ most deadly “friendly fire” incident in Afghanistan, the Washington Post reported on Sunday, citing a Pentagon source.

In the misdirected attack in December, 3 US soldiers and 5 Afghans were killed and dozens injured, among them the future Afghan interim leader, Hamid Karzai.

According to the Post, the global positioning system (GPS) device’s battery died shortly after an air-force controller on the ground had put into the machine the coordinates for a Taliban target north of Kandahar.

Coordinates are numbers that can exactly describe a position on the earth’s surface.

The devices are programmed to memorize the coordinates for their own positions upon restart. Not realizing this, the controller then transmitted the new coordinates to a B-52 bomber, which then hit the US position.—dpa