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U.N. Presents U.S. Airstrike Report of Afgan Village
Wednesday, July 31, 2002
By Edith M. Lederer
Associated Press Writer

According to The Times of London, the initial report said U.S. troops who arrived at the scene after the air strikes "cleaned the area," removing evidence of "shrapnel, bullets and traces of blood." It quoted an unnamed U.N. source suggesting this indicated "an American cover-up." Col. Roger King, a U.S. command spokesman in Afghanistan, said Monday the description "sounds remarkably like what the (U.S.) fact-finding team did" - that is, collect blood specks and ammunition samples as evidence upon first arriving at the scene after the attack.

UNITED NATIONS -- AP
Washington did not pressure U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to revise or prevent the release of a report on a U.S. airstrike that killed dozens of Afghan villagers, a U.N. spokesman says.

The United Nations had been expected to make the report public. But the top U.N. envoy to Afghanistan, Lakhdar Brahimi, decided instead to keep it secret and hand it over to the United States and Afghanistan, which are conducting a joint investigation of the attack.

U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard said Tuesday he didn't know whether Brahimi had any contacts with U.S. officials about the decision.

It will now be up to U.S. and Afghan authorities to decide whether to publish the report, compiled by U.N. humanitarian workers who were among the first on the scene after the July 1 attack in Uruzgan province, Eckhard said.
(More: Miami.com News Source)
2002 © The Associated Press.

Dan