US bombing kills 14 construction workers in Afghanistan

“All of our poor workers have been killed,” Sayed Noorulla Jalili, director of Amerifa, a Kabul-based road construction firm told the media.

One official in the province, which borders Pakistan, said that 25 people had died in the bombing. Taj Mohammad, head of the Nuristan provincial capital, told the French news agency AFP, “We collected their flesh and put it in bags. We handed the remains of the ones we could recognize to their families.”

AFP quoted the head of a hospital in the neighboring province of Nangarhar, where 10 of the bodies were sent, as saying: “Most of them were not recognizable,” with relatives compelled to identify them from clothing or other characteristics.

A spokesman for NATO claimed the occupation forces did not know about the civilian deaths. The US-led forces were “engaged in Nurgaram and Du Ab districts, and in those places we used air strikes against [Taliban],” said the spokesman, Brigadier General Carlos Branco. “The situation is not clear at all at this stage. We are carrying out the investigation and trying to get a clear picture.”