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CNN Live Today

Pentagon Looks Into Bombing of Afghan Wedding

Aired July 02, 2002 - 10:12   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.


THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
DARYN KAGAN, CNN ANCHOR: Let’s move on to the Pentagon, which has dispatched a team of investigators to central Afghanistan. It’s all to explain a deadly U.S. attack on a wedding party. Dozens of people, including women and children, were killed in yesterday’s strike, and U.S. officials are questioning initial reports that a bomb delivered the deadly blow.

Our Nic Robertson is in Bagram now with this developing story.

Nic -- hello.

NIC ROBERTSON, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, the very latest from here, the foreign ministry in Kabul now puts the number of dead at 40. They say more than 100 people were injured. They also say that 25 Afghans, all from one family, perished in the incident, and they say that they’re calling upon the coalition forces to look at the way that they proceed with these operations, to try and avoid Afghan civilian casualties in the future.

Now, the information we are getting is still conflicting. From the hospital in Kandahar where many of the injured have been taken, there are 22 people there, we understand, who are being treated for injuries in this incident.

From those eyewitnesses, they say as many as 120 or 130 people may have been killed. They say that there were 300 people attending the wedding. However, the investigation team, the international investigation team, including U.S. State Department officials, it also includes military coalition officials as well as Afghan ministerial officials, is in Uruzgan Province, but it has not yet reached the village of Deh Rawud, where the incident took place.

We’re told this investigation team will not get there until Wednesday. They are staying in a larger town in Uruzgan overnight tonight, where it is safer for them to be. So the information still conflicting, and the international investigation still to actually get to the site -- Daryn.

KAGAN: But Nic, how much do we understand so far about what could have taken place? I’m sure the U.S. military didn’t intend to bomb out a wedding party.

ROBERTSON: From what the coalition military briefers have told us, there was a Special Forces operation. It went into an area. It was engaged by fire from forces on the ground. They called in close air support. That included an AC-130 gunship and included a B-52 bomber.

Now, these aircraft and some others that were operating in the area, the coalition briefers say, believe that they were targeted by anti-aircraft gun positions on the ground. They also say that the area they were operating in they knew was hostile to coalition forces, that they believe there may have been Taliban or al Qaeda elements there.

And it is the fact that they were targeted from a number of different anti-aircraft gun positions on the ground that led them to believe that this was more than sporadic firing or celebratory fire from a wedding, and it was as they pursued those targets that this incident happened.

As yet, it’s very unclear about how it unfolded on the ground. It was, we are told, a Special Forces operation that was large and had a number of objectives. It may have even involved four different villages in the same area -- Daryn.

KAGAN: Nic Robertson, reporting to us from Bagram.

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