Afghan fact-finding team says Nato killed civilians 'for no reason'

An Afghan fact-finding team appointed by President Hamid Karzai on Saturday blamed Nato-led troops for what it said was the unnecessary killing of dozens of civilians. A child who had climbed a tree on December 13 was among the 21 civilians reportedly killed by Nato attacks over the past few weeks.
"Our delegation found that a child who went up a tree to collect leaves for sheep was killed in the bombing by the Nato chopper without any pre-co-ordination with the Kandahar administration," Hajji Tahir Safi, an advisor to the president, told reporters in Kabul. "The child's father rushed to the bombing site with other family members as another chopper of the international forces dropped other bombs," he added.
Safi said that the child's father, Abdul Rahim, along with his four relatives, had all died on the spot, while his daughter was injured in the Nato bombing. Three other children from the same village, two of them girls of 8 and 12 years of age, also died.The Nato-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) reportedly told the fact-finding team that the bombing had been prompted by the discovery of three Taliban insurgents planting roadside bombs in the area.
Elsewhere in Kandahar on the same day, three civilians who were carrying a water-pump on a motorbike were bombed by another coalition helicopter. "ISAF told us they shot them because they thought they were carrying a cannon," Safi said. Nato has apologised for the deaths and has compensated the families of the deceased with 5,000 dollars by Nato, according to Safi. Yet, civilian causalities and night raids remain highly sensitive issues and a matter of tension between the Afghan president and his Western allies.
One of the survivors of the Kandahar incidents, who was part of the fact-finding mission, said his sister had since asked him to procure "a suicide vest to blow myself to kill foreign soldiers." In another incident in the northern Kapisa province, rockets fired by French troops on December 2 reportedly killed seven civilians, including a tribal leader. But a subsequent investigation had found that neither Taliban fighters nor any gunmen had been present in the area when coalition forces struck.