August 1, 2002	Thursday	Jamadi-ul-Awwal 21,1423

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UNITED NATIONS, July 31: The United States did not pressure UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan to revise or prevent the release of a report on a US airstrike that killed dozens of Afghan villagers, a UN spokesman claimed on Tuesday.

The United Nations was expected to make the report public but the top UN envoy to Afghanistan, Lakhdar Brahimi, decided instead to keep it secret and hand it over to the United States and Afghanistan, which are conducting a joint investigation of the attack.

The spokesman, Fred Eckard, said that Brahimi had decided not to go public with the internal UN document, as the Afghan and US authorities had already launched investigations before the fact-finding report had been completed.

“We hope it will be of help to them as they work to establish the facts,” Fred Eckard said.

Asked why the text would not be made public by the UN, the spokesman said a UN seal would not be put on a fact-finding report prepared by humanitarian workers who pass judgment on matters which were more competently assessed by logistics, ballistics, human rights, police and military experts.

In reply to another question, the spokesman said he had seen no evidence that either US or Afghan officials tried to influence the UN report.

It will now be up to US and Afghan authorities to decide whether to publish the report, compiled by UN humanitarian workers who had been among the first on the scene after the July 1 attack in Uruzgan province, Eckard said.