Kabul, December 31: Afghan government investigators concluded on Wednesday, December 30, that foreign troops dragged 10 civilians, including eight children, from their homes and shooting them dead.
“A unit of international forces descended from a plane and took 10 people from three homes, eight of them school students in grades six, nine and 10, one of them a guest, the rest from the same family, and shot them dead,” Asadullah Wafa, head of the presidential investigating team, said in a statement.
The investigation team was shown documents from the principal of the school that the students attended, proving their status.
The incident took place late Saturday in the eastern province of Kunar.
President Hamid Karzai had spoken to the father and uncles of the students to offer his condolences, promising a full investigation.
The International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), which has 113,000 troops in Afghanistan, said it had no activities in the area at the time the incident took place.
But a senior Western military official said US Special Forces have been conducting operations in the area, separately from ISAF.
Civilian deaths in war-ravaged Afghanistan are a sensitive issue for the public and fan tensions between Karzai and the foreign troops.
The UN earlier this week confirmed 2,038 civilian deaths in the first 10 months of 2009, indicating a 10.8 percent increase from the same period of 2008.
Protests
Hundreds of angry university students took to the streets in at least two cities to protest students’ killings.
“Our demonstration is against those foreigners who have come to our country,” Safiullah Aminzai, one of the students marching in Jalalabad, capital of eastern Nangahar province, told AFP.
“They have not brought democracy to Afghanistan but they are killing our religious scholars and children.”
The angry protesters blocked the main roads in Jalalabad and torched a US flag and an effigy of President Barack Obama in a public square.
They were also shunting anti-US slogans such as “death to Obama” and “death to foreign forces”.
“We have no more patience,” fumed a group of the protesters.
“It has happened repeatedly. If it occurs again, we will drop our pens and take arms.”
In downtown Kabul protesters tied green ribbons around their foreheads with the “stop killing us” written in red.
Others chanted “foreigners out” and “death to the murderers of Afghan people”.
Analysts have repeatedly warned that the indiscriminate killing of civilians is turning ordinary Afghans against foreign troops and eroding fragile public support for Karzai.
-Agencies