Kabul, Afghanistan – A U.S. Marine unit broke international humanitarian law by using excessive force during a shooting spree last month that left 12 people dead, an Afghan human rights group said in a report Saturday.
The troops fired indiscriminately at pedestrians, people in cars, public buses and taxis in six locations along a 10-mile stretch of road in Nangahar province after an explosives-rigged minivan crashed into their convoy on March 4, according to the report by Afghanistan’s Independent Human Rights Commission.
Six people were killed near the blast site, while the other six died on the road as the troops sped away, said Ahmad Nader Nadery, the group’s spokesman.
The dead included a 1-year-old boy, a 4-year-old girl and three women, the report said. Thirty-five people were wounded in the shootings.
“In failing to distinguish between civilians and legitimate military targets, the U.S. Marines Corps Special Forces employed indiscriminate force,” the report said. “Their actions thus constitute a serious violation of international humanitarian law standards.”
The group said its report was based on interviews with victims and their families, witnesses, local community leaders, hospital officials and police.
A U.S. military commander has also determined that the Marines used excessive force and referred the case for possible criminal inquiry, a senior U.S. defense official told The Associated Press on Wednesday.
U.S. military officials said after the incident that the suicide attack was part of an ambush that included militant gunmen shooting at Marines, which may have caused some of the civilian casualties.
The human rights group’s report said “there is some evidence at the immediate site of the incident to support this claim, but it is far from conclusive, and all witnesses and Afghan government officials interviewed uniformly denied that any attack beyond the initial (suicide car bombing) took place.”
The group also alleges that U.S. troops serving with NATO’s International Security Assistance Force in southern Afghanistan returned to the area after the bombing for an investigation and a cleanup operation, which involved the removal of all bullet shells and cartridges.
The group said it interviewed a member of Afghanistan’s National Police criminal investigations office who said his unit had searched around the site after the incident, but that “ISAF forces had collected all shells, magazines, cartridges from the spot, and we could not find any trace or sign of them.”
U.S. military officials were not available to comment on that allegation.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai has repeatedly pleaded for Western troops to show more restraint amid concern that civilian deaths shake domestic support for the foreign military involvement that he needs to prop up his government, increasingly under threat from a resurgent Taliban.
