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KABUL, July 6: The US general leading the coalition campaign in Afghanistan said on Saturday nearly 50 people may have been killed in a bombing raid on a wedding party, but that American investigators had been unable to determine how many people died.
Lieutenant-General Dan McNeill, commander of the coalition forces in Afghanistan, said that a more thorough investigation was needed into Sunday’s bombing in central Uruzgan province as the US investigators were not shown any graves during a fact-finding mission.
“I believe there’s 48 dead and 117 wounded,” McNeill told a joint press conference with Afghan Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah while emphasising that the figures were those of Afghan investigators.
“I believe that a more formal investigation will expose a lot more facts and expose a lot more of what occurred and why it occurred.”
The joint Afghan-US fact-finding mission, which returned to Kabul on Saturday, was dispatched to Uruzgan province’s Dehrawad district to probe the bombing which the US claims was prompted by hostile anti-aircraft guns in the area.
But McNeill said the joint US-Afghan investigating team had not been able to see the bodies, which had already been buried, or to confirm the number of deaths for themselves.
A US member of the team said they had only seen five graves and 11 injured people during their visit to Uruzgan. “We are just going with the Afghan account,” he told Reuters. “We asked and we asked but they didn’t show us (any more graves).”
ANTI-AIRCRAFT FIRE: The preliminary investigation also failed to establish precisely what caused the incident, and in particular whether US planes had been targeted by anti-aircraft fire.
McNeill said there were “ample indications” that Monday’s air strike was launched in response to anti-aircraft fire from the ground, but admitted no anti-aircraft gun had been found.
“There clearly were a number of reports that came from the ground and from aircrews about anti-aircraft fire but that’s about the extent of what I have right now,” he said.
McNeill said investigators had collected shell casings and shrapnel from the site which would be examined as part of the formal probe.
Villagers in the rugged central province of Uruzgan have said they were merely firing rifles into the air to celebrate a wedding party, in line with local traditions.
Abdullah said the investigation would help to “prevent these accidents happening again”.
“The question is not whether to continue the operation against al Qaeda, or whether the transitional government should support or cooperate in the manner it had cooperated in the past with the coalition forces — this is not the question,” Abdullah told a joint news conference with McNeill in Kabul.
—AFP/Reuters
