KABUL, An Afghan presidential delegation looking into reports that up to 10 civilians were accidentally killed by U.S. troops earlier this week said Wednesday that it had so far confirmed at least eight deaths, all schoolboys ages 12 to 17.
That contradicts initial findings by the NATO force regarding Sunday's strike in Kunar, a remote northeastern province. Western military officials earlier reported nine killed, all adult males and all insurgents, and said on Wednesday that the incident remains under investigation.
Asadullah Wafa, who heads the investigative panel that traveled to Kunar on the president's orders, reported that the boys' bodies were found in a single village home in Kunar's Narang district, and that all were members of the same extended family. He indicated there were other remains found in the house that had not yet been identified.
Wafa suggested that an informant had provided misleading information to Western forces, triggering the strike. There have been past instances of villagers trying to settle scores with rival clans or tribes by giving foreign troops false accounts of insurgent activity.
NATO, which had originally denied carrying out operations in the area at the time of the deaths, now says a joint Afghan-Western force carried out the strike. But a spokesman for Afghanistan 's Defense Ministry, Gen. Mohammed Azimi, told reporters that only U.S. special forces had been involved . INP
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