August 1, 2010

KABUL — Afghans held a rally in the capital Kabul on Sunday to protest the alleged NATO killing of 52 civilians in the volatile south, but the coalition said it had still found no evidence of the deaths.

More than 200 people demonstrated over the July 23 incident in the Sangin district of Helmand province, when President Hamid Karzai says a rocket strike by a helicopter gunship on a residential compound took place.

The protesters shouted "Death to America" and carried banners calling for justice and pictures of children they say were killed in the strike in Regey village, according to an AFP correspondent at the scene.

But NATO and government investigations have not resolved conflicting accounts of the alleged incident.

The Afghan National Security Council conducted its own investigation at the president's behest and found that a NATO rocket had hit a house in Sangin "leaving 52 civilians dead, including women and children", Karzai has said.

But assessments carried out by coalition and Afghan officials, including imagery of the scene and interviews with witnesses, have produced "no substance in terms of proof or evidence" said NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) spokesman, Brigadier General Josef Blotz.

Blotz said that on July 23 there was a firefight between coalition troops and insurgents lasting several hours in an area "a couple of kilometres" away from Regey village.

There, he said, precision munitions had been used on a compound where six to eight people, mostly insurgents, had been killed, although "one to three civilians may have been inadvertently killed".

Blotz said that resolving the dispute was a matter of urgency for NATO but that there was no timeline for a conclusion of the investigations.

"We need to close the case sometime soon, it's urgent," said Blotz.

The issue is sensitive in Afghanistan, where many people blame the presence of foreign forces for the violence of the nearly nine-year-old Taliban-led insurgency. Close to 150,000 US and NATO troops are deployed in Afghanistan.

The United Nations said this year that 2,412 civilians were killed in the war in 2009, making it the deadliest year for ordinary Afghans since the 2001 US-led invasion.