AFGHANISTAN: Afghanistan yesterday condemned a US bombing raid which apparently killed 40 wedding guests at a remote village, and demanded immediate safeguards to protect civilians during anti-terrorism operations.
The Pentagon's leadership discounted an errant 2,000 pound bomb as the cause of scores of civilian casualties reported at a village wedding in central Afghanistan but did not rule out the possibility that an AC-130 gunship mistook celebratory gunfire for hostile fire.
The Afghan President, Mr Hamid Karzai, asked US forces to take "every necessary measure" to avoid further civilian deaths, the Foreign Minister, Mr Abdullah Abdullah, said here as a joint US-Afghan probe into Sunday's bombing got under way.
Mr Karzai urged the US "to fully stop the repetition of such awkward incidents, and ensure that military operations aimed at finding terrorists do not harm civilians". He said Kabul deplored as unjustifiable the US bombardment of a wedding party at a village in Dehrawad district in the central Uruzgan province, which he said killed 40 people.
"It is understandable that there are possible civilian casualties in military operations," he said. "But, an incident with such magnitude and such casualties under such conditions is by no means justifiable." His blunt criticism comes as Afghan and US officials, at odds over what led to Sunday night's strike, came up with conflicting accounts of the bombing which the US said was carried out on Sunday and Monday.
The US had earlier rejected Afghan claims that they had mistaken traditional celebratory wedding firing for enemy fire, insisting its bomber planes had come under heavy direct attack.
Local Afghan officials quoted eye-witnesses as saying that US aircraft flew over the village twice and started the bombing during the third run.
The B-52s and C-130s had been prowling around Uruzgan capital Tirin Kot, east of Dehrawad, where US special forces have based operations to hunt down the Taliban's elusive spiritual leader Mullah Mohammad Omar.
Human rights organisation Amnesty International yesterday also asked the US-led coalition to prevent a repetition of the bombing raid. It said it was concerned at "mounting" civilian casualties caused by targeting errors of the US-led coalition against terrorism in Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, Mullah Omar, who has eluded the US during their nine-month military campaign in Afghanistan, was believed to be hiding in mountains in Uruzgan.
Osama bin Laden was also believed to be alive but there was no information on his whereabouts, Mr Abdullah said.
The US said it had issued instructions to the more than 250 US diplomatic missions abroad to review security before the 4th July holiday.