KABUL : Afghan President Hamid Karzai said Monday that NATO troops had fired a rocket that killed 52 "innocent" villagers in southern Afghanistan, as leaked documents laid bare the civilian toll of the US-led war.
An investigation by the National Directorate of Security found that a house in Helmand province's Sangin district was hit on Friday "by a rocket launched by NATO/ISAF troops, leaving 52 civilians dead, including women and children," a statement from Karzai's office said.
"The president condoled via phone with the mourning families and called on NATO troops to put into practice every possible measure to avoid harming civilians during military operations," it said.
Karzai's statement came three days after Friday's attack on Regey village, and followed repeated denials by officials of NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) that their forces were involved in the incident.
The statement said Karzai was "deeply saddened by the heartbreaking incident, which is both morally and humanly unacceptable".
"The president and cabinet of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan condemned on Monday in the strongest possible terms the rocket attack on a village in Helmand province that killed up to 52 innocent civilians," it said.
Reports surfaced on Saturday that a helicopter gunship fired on villagers who had been told by insurgents to leave their homes as a firefight with ISAF troops was imminent.
According to witness accounts, men, women and children fled to Regey village and were fired on by helicopter gunships as they took cover.
Abdul Ghafar, 45, told AFP he lost "two daughters and one son and two sisters" in the attack.
He and six other families fled to Regey, about 500 metres (550 yards) from their village of Ishaqzai, after being warned about an imminent battle, he said.
Men and women took shelter in separate compounds, he said, ahead of an expected firefight between Taliban and NATO troops around 4:30 pm (1200 GMT).
"Helicopters started firing on the compound killing almost everyone inside," he said, speaking at the Mirwais hospital in Kandahar city.
"We rushed to the house and there were eight children wounded and around 40 to 50 others killed," he said.
He took three girls and four boys to the Kandahar hospital, he said, adding: "Three of the wounded are my nephews and one is my son. One of the wounded children is four years old and has lost both parents."
The BBC said it sent an Afghan reporter to Regey to interview residents, who described the attack and said they buried 39 people.
ISAF spokesman Colonel Wayne Shanks said the location of the reported deaths was "several kilometres away from where we had engaged enemy fighters".
ISAF forces had fought a battle with insurgents, he said, but a NATO investigation team dispatched after the casualty reports emerged "had accounted for all the rounds that were shot at the enemy", Shanks said.
"We found no evidence of civilian casualties," he said.
Close to 150,000 US and NATO troops are deployed in Afghanistan to fight the insurgency and many Afghans believed their presence is the cause of the violence, though a number of reports, including by the United Nations, have found that most are caused by Taliban attacks.
But leaked documents carried by the web whistleblower Wikileaks on Sunday pointed to under-reporting of civilian casualties, which Waheed Omar, Karzai's spokesman, said was a cause of concern for the Afghan government.
The Pentagon files and field reports spanning the period from January 2004 to December 2009 detail hundreds of unreported civilian deaths caused by NATO and Taliban attacks, according to Britain's Guardian newspaper.
"We have continuously stated that the Afghan government and Afghan people were upset about civilian casualties," Omar told reporters, adding that Karzai had found nothing new in the leaked documents.
The White House condemned the leaks, saying the information could endanger US lives but also pointed to the administration's long-held concerns about alleged links between Pakistani intelligence agents and Afghan insurgents.
- AFP/jm
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