Four civilians were killed when US troops fired on a bus in Afghanistan on Monday, sparking furious protests and an expression of regret from the military alliance. About 200 men took to the streets of Kandahar to demonstrate over the killings on a highway outside the southern Afghan city, burning tyres and shouting "death to America, death to Karzai, death to this government".
Hours later, three Taliban militants wearing suicide vests and carrying guns tried to storm the office of Afghanistan's premier spy agency in Kandahar, sparking a shoot-out with security forces. The incidents reflected chronic insecurity in the province of Kandahar, where US-led military forces are preparing a major push to dislodge the Taliban from their spiritual capital.
The Afghan government said a woman and a child were among the dead and 18 others were wounded in the shooting, which occurred when the bus neared a Nato convoy on the highway linking Kandahar and the western province of Herat. Nato's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) confirmed that a woman was among those killed and said troops could not identify the bus as it approached a slow-moving military convoy at speed before dawn. The patrol "warned off" the vehicle once with a flashlight and three times with flares, "which were not heeded," it said in a statement.
The governor of Kandahar, Tooryalai Wesa, and a Western military official in Kabul told AFP that the soldiers were American. The civilian deaths drew strong criticism from President Hamid Karzai, who said: "Opening fire on a passenger bus is an act against Nato's commitment to protect civilians and is by no means justifiable." Nato said it "deeply regrets" the civilian deaths, after its own investigation of the incident, saying its troops treated five wounded people at the scene and that 13 others were treated by local medics for minor injuries.