U.S. Plane Misses Target and Bombs House, Killing 11 Afghan Civilians

A U.S. warplane called in to support allied Afghans under fire mistakenly bombed a house Wednesday, killing 11 civilians. It was the worst friendly-fire incident in Afghanistan in nine months.

Afghan authorities condemned the bombing, and the U.S. military said it was not clear why the bomb missed its target: a group of assailants attacking a checkpoint. The 20 attackers earlier fought a brief battle with Pakistani soldiers deployed on the Pakistan side of the border, U.S. military spokesman Lt. Col. Douglas Lefforge said.

The assailants then headed toward the Afghan checkpoint just east of Shkin, 135 miles south of Kabul, and opened fire, wounding four Afghan soldiers.

Americans sent four armored Humvees with at least 16 U.S. soldiers to the scene and called in two Harrier attack jets, Lefforge said.

The attackers fled, apparently splitting into two groups. One of the planes fired a 30-millimeter cannon and dropped a 1,000-pound laser-guided bomb that crashed into the house.

“Coalition forces never intentionally target civilian locations,” Lefforge said. “The bomb missed the intended target and landed on the house.” Whether “it was a technical malfunction or bad coordinates or anything like that, we just simply don’t know yet,” Lefforge said.

American troops arriving at the bomb site found one injured survivor and took him and the four wounded Afghan soldiers to a U.S. base near the eastern town of Khost. No U.S. soldiers were injured.

“To the families of the Afghan citizens accidentally killed in a bombing in Afghanistan ... we send our sincere condolences,” Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Wednesday at a Pentagon briefing. “We sincerely regret the incident.”

The last time American forces caused major civilian casualties was July 1, when 48 civilians were killed and 117 were wounded by fire from an Air Force AC-130 gunship that attacked several villages in Afghanistan’s Uruzgan province, according to Afghan officials.

Across the border in the Pakistani town of Angoor Adda, shopkeeper Muhammad Ramzan said witnesses told him Wednesday’s victims mostly were women and children of the Ahmedzai tribe.

About 11,500 coalition troops -- 8,500 of them American -- are in Afghanistan hunting rebel fighters from the former Taliban regime, Al Qaeda and their allies. About 100 American soldiers are based at Shkin, an area that has been the target of rocket attacks and ambushes in recent weeks.

Afghan authorities say Taliban remnants are reorganizing, especially in southern Afghanistan, in efforts to destabilize the fledgling government of U.S.-backed President Hamid Karzai.

In another development, soldiers of the new Afghan national army battled Taliban fighters in eastern Afghanistan, killing a former Taliban minister in a four-hour gun battle, state television reported. The former minister of borders and tribal affairs, Ammanullah, was reported killed in Orgun, 108 miles south of Kabul. Several other suspected Taliban fighters also were killed, and four government soldiers were injured, state TV said. Ammanullah used only one name.