Marines used excessive force: probes

The US military has determined that more than 40 civilians were killed or wounded by US Marines after a suicide bombing in a village near Jalalabad, Afghanistan, last month, the Washington Post reported yesterday.

Citing US commander who ordered the probe, the newspaper said there was no evidence that the Marine special operations platoon came under small-arms fire after the bombing, although the Marines reported taking enemy fire and seeing people with weapons.

The troops continued shooting at perceived threats as they traveled miles from the site of the March 4 attack, said Major General Frank Kearney, head of Special Operations Command Central, according to the report.

They hit several vehicles, killing at least 10 people and wounding 33, among them children and elderly villagers, the Post said.

"We found ... no brass that we can confirm that small-arms fire came at them," Kearney is quoted by the paper as saying. "We have testimony from Marines that is in conflict with unanimous testimony from civilians at the sites."

The results of the preliminary investigation are similar to the findings of an official Afghan human rights inquiry and contradict initial reports that the civilians might have been killed in a small-arms attack that followed the suicide bombing, the Post said.

Afghanistan's Independent Human Rights Commission said in the report on Saturday that the Marines had violated international humanitarian law by using excessive force.

"In failing to distinguish between civilians and legitimate military targets, the US Marines Corps Special Forces employed indiscriminate force," the report said.

US officials said after the incident the suicide attack was part of complex ambush that included militant gunmen shooting at Marines, which may have caused some of the civilian casualties.

The report, however, said that while there was some evidence at the site of the incident to back this claim, "it is far from conclusive and all witnesses and Afghan government officials interviewed uniformly denied that any attack beyond the initial [bombing] took place."

Meanwhile, four Afghan employees of a US-owned private security firm were killed in a suicide attack near Kandahar airfield, a base housing thousands of foreign troops yesterday, police said.

The attacker, carrying explosives on a motorbike, targeted a US Protection and Investigations (USPI) vehicle just a few hundred yards from Kandahar airfield, a base for the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force.