WASHINGTON, July 16: A senior Pentagon official said on Monday he was unsure if a US gunship blamed by Afghans for dozens of deaths at a wedding party had been under direct hostile fire as US military officials previously said.

The July 1 incident in central Uruzgan province strained relations between Kabul and Washington. Afghans said civilians were gunned down in the midst of a wedding celebration in which it was customary to shoot guns in the air, while US military officials said the AC-130 gunship had been responding to hostile fire from the ground.

The Afghan government says 48 people were killed and 117 wounded in the incident in the village of Des Rawud, which is in the home province of Taliban leader Mullah Omar, who has not been captured.

“I can’t say unequivocally that the AC-130 was fired on. That will come out, hopefully, in the investigation,” Air Force Brig. Gen. John Rosa, a deputy director at the Joint Staff, said at the regular Pentagon media briefing.

“I have seen nothing to say the aircraft was fired on. I don’t know that. It could well have been,” Rosa said.

“There was definitely ground fire, our troops were fired on,” Rosa said. “There was firing in the air. People witnessed that,” he said.

But whether it was directed at the AC-130, “I can’t tell you that. I don’t know if it was or not. But there were definitely two types of fire,” Rosa said.

US Air Force Brig. Gen. Anthony Przybyslawski arrived recently in Afghanistan to lead a team of 11 experts investigating the incident.

Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke said the investigation would provide more information on what happened there.

“There’s a lot of solid information that we don’t have at this time, so I think we have to let the investigation do what it’s suppose to do, which is get those sorts of answers,” she told reporters.

Clarke said the military had been coordinating its operations in Afghanistan with Afghan officials. “We have coordinated very, very closely with the Afghan people, with the regional leaders since last fall and we will continue to do so going forward,” she said.

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, visiting Afghanistan on Monday, said US forces would try to avoid civilian casualties but there could be no absolute guarantees.

“We very much regret any time that innocent people are killed. All the evidence suggested that innocent people were killed (in Uruzgan),” he said.—Reuters