At least 45 civilians, many women and children, were killed in a rocket attack by the NATO-led force in Afghanistan's southern Helmand province last week.
The incident happened in Helmand's Sangin district on Friday when civilians crammed into a mud-built house to flee fighting between NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) troops and Taliban insurgents, Siyamak Herawi said.
A spokesman for ISAF said yesterday it was aware of reports about the incident and was investigating.
Reports had surfaced on Saturday that a helicopter gunship fired on villagers who had been told by insurgents to leave their homes as a firefight with troops from NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) was imminent.
According to witness accounts, men, women and children fled to Regey village and were fired on from helicopter gunships as they took cover.
Abdul Ghafar, 45, told a reporter that he lost ‘two daughters and one son and two sisters’ in the attack.
‘Helicopters started firing on the compound killing almost everyone inside,’ he said, speaking at the Mirwais hospital in Kandahar city.
ISAF spokesman Colonel Wayne Shanks said the location of the reported deaths was ‘several kilometres away from where we had engaged enemy fighters’.
‘We found no evidence of civilian casualties,' he said.
But leaked documents carried by the web whistleblower Wikileaks on Sunday pointed to under-reporting of civilian casualties.
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.
