ISLAMABAD, July 4: The governor of the central Afghan province where scores of villagers were reportedly killed by a US air raid on Sunday has blamed “informants” for feeding the US bombers wrong information, the Afghan Islamic Press (AIP) said on Thursday.

“We strongly demand the US and Afghan authorities hand over their spies who conveyed wrong information to the US forces,” Uruzgan governor Yar Mohammad was quoted as saying by the private news service.

“This is not the first time. Similar wrong information has led to the bombing of Uruzgan in the past, also causing deaths of many people,” he said.

The governor said the Sunday night raid on Dehrawad district “left 170 people dead and wounded”.

“Several more people have died of their injuries over the past two to three days,” he said.

Afghan officials earlier reported 40 people were killed when US planes strafed several villages in Dehrawad, including Kakrakai village where a wedding party was under way.

A joint probe team of US and Afghan officials arrived in Dehrawad on Wednesday and spent several hours examining one of the sites that were hit.

A Pentagon spokeswoman and a pool report filed by journalists accompanying the team said that no bodies or graves were visible at the site they toured on Wednesday.

Villagers told the journalists that the dead had been either buried or taken away by relatives.

US military officials have said that their planes attacked six targets near the village where the wedding celebrations were being held after coming under fire from anti-aircraft artillery on the ground.

Chief US military spokesman in Afghanistan, Lt Col Roger King, said the village was not an initial target.

“The village itself was not the subject of a pre-planned target... the focus of the operation was not to target that village,” he told reporters at Bagram Air Base, the coalition base north of Kabul.

“Now if the aircraft received fire from within the village, the location of fire would become a target.”

Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah said on Tuesday that US military officials, summonsed by President Hamid Karzai for an explanation, had said that they were acting on a report that Al Qaeda and Taliban members were in the region.—AFP