A high-level US military team will on Monday begin probing the bombing raid in central Afghanistan where 48 people were reportedly killed, a US coalition representative said on Saturday.
The 11-member team, headed by US major general Anthony
Przybyslawski, will include those with expertise in special operations, medical, legal and public affairs, Lieutenant Colonel Roger King told reporters.
He said Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s transitional government named major general Sher Mohammed as an observer in the probe team.
”It will be a relatively standard board proceeding in that there will be an investigative process, witnesses will be heard, evidence will be taken by a variety of means, and experts will analyse the evidence,” King said.
”We believe they will probably start their work on Monday or possibly Tuesday.”
The probe team was expected to go to the Dehrawad district in central Uruzgan province where the wedding party was hit on the night of June 30.
The probe will follow a preliminary inquiry last week that made limited headway as US investigators were not shown any graves while Afghan officials say 48 people were killed and 117 more were wounded.
On Saturday, King said he had no confirmation of the casualty figures given by Afghan authorities.
”All that we have is the proof that we saw 32 people wounded following something which occurred at the time.”
Local officials in the remote district of Dehrawad said earlier in the week that US forces had stormed the village after the bombing and prevented the evacuation of survivors to hospital.
The United States, whose forces are in Afghanistan seeking remnants of the former hardline Islamic Taliban regime and its al-Qaida allies, has insisted that coalition aircraft had attacked only after they were fired on.
It began air strikes against al-Qaida and the now-ousted Taliban in October last year, after the September 11 terror attacks in the United States blamed on al-Qaida and its leader, Osama bin Laden.
While the US accepts that the military operation resulted in civilian casualties, the US authorities have maintained that the number of casualties remained unclear.
The US has said an AC-130 plane returned fire after coming under anti-aircraft artillery fire in the area where the wedding party was hit.
No anti-aircraft artillery cannons were found at any of the sites where civilians were reported killed, but Pentagon officials have suggested they could have been moved. – Sapa-AFP