Kabul, Afghanistan – The U.S. military is investigating the possibility that soldiers fired into a crowd of Afghans at the scene of a fatal traffic accident that sparked a day of rioting here earlier this week.
“There are indications, as part of our initial investigation, that coalition soldiers did in fact use their weapons in self-defense,” said Col. Tom Collins, a spokesman for U.S. forces.
In a statement released Monday, Collins had said there were “indications that at least one coalition military vehicle fired warning shots over the crowd.”
He said Wednesday that the initial assessment was based on news video, and added: “We’re going to look at the rest of the event to see what other events might have happened.”
The U.S. military reported one person was killed in the road accident, while President Hamid Karzai’s office said five people died.
Afghan health authorities have informed the U.S. military that approximately 20 people died and that more than 160 were injured in the accident and the unrest that followed, Collins said.
No U.S. soldiers were injured.
“Just because coalition soldiers weren’t hurt or injured doesn’t mean that there wasn’t an imminent danger of serious bodily injury or death to them,” Collins said. “Our people are very well trained. They know how to react to situations.”
About half an hour after a heavy U.S. military cargo truck rammed into Afghan vehicles in an intersection Monday morning, an angry crowd of between 300 and 500 people began throwing rocks and firing small arms at U.S. soldiers and Afghan police, Collins said.
Witnesses say the crowd was trying to prevent the troops from leaving the scene to ensure that victims were compensated, and that police had time to finish investigating the accident and arresting anyone responsible. They also say some military vehicles drove over people, and crashed into shops, in their hurry to leave.
Stressing that the investigation is in its early stages, Collins insisted U.S. troops had stayed on the scene to help the injured and recover the damaged truck, whose brakes had apparently failed.
“From our post-event analysis, it is strongly believed that there were agitators in the crowd who wanted to use these events for their own criminal purposes, totally counterproductive to the police and government’s efforts to provide aid and assistance to the accident victims,” Collins said.
A special session of Afghanistan’s parliament called on the government Tuesday to prosecute U.S. soldiers responsible for the fatal traffic accident. The truck’s driver is on the Bagram air base but is not under arrest, Collins disclosed.
“We have no indications at this time that he acted inappropriately,” the spokesman said.
Elsewhere in southern Afghanistan, Taliban fighters Wednesday killed at least 12 Afghan police in two separate attacks and kidnapped several others, Afghan officials said.
