The US military on Friday said accusations that their air strikes had killed more than 100 people including dozens of civilians were "grossly exaggerated", as investigators returned from the stricken area.
The US military and Afghan defence and interior ministry teams are jointly investigating the incident in the western province of Farah where Afghan forces called in air strikes amid heavy clashes with Taliban insurgents this week.
They had expected to release a report on Friday but this may be pushed back to Saturday to include results of a separate probe ordered by Afghan President Hamid Karzai, a US military spokesman told AFP.
Colonel Greg Julian refused to comment on reports from citing US officials saying investigations had found that US troops were responsible for the deaths of villagers in the air strikes.
"There were civilian casualties no doubt," he said.
"But the conclusion from the investigation has not been reached, and it's inappropriate to indicate one way or the other how they were caused."
One of the issues being looked into was whether the Taliban had caused the civilian casualties by throwing grenades among villagers, he said.
Afghan police have told AFP that more than 100 people were , about 25 to 30 of them insurgents and the remainder civilians, including elderly people and children.
US General David McKiernan, the top international military commander in Afghanistan, has also said "25-plus" insurgents were killed but the number of civilian dead was not confirmed.
A member of the Farah council, Abdul Basir Khair Khowa, told AFP that he had been to the area and was told by locals that 147 civilians, whose names he had recorded, were killed.
Some local media reports have cited villagers claiming up to 170 civilians died.
"All parties agreed that the high numbers that have been stated previously are grossly exaggerated," Julian said, adding this included the Afghan police figure of 100.
The clashes from Monday to Tuesday were focused on two villages in the Bala Buluk district, a dangerous area where Taliban have a strong presence making it difficult for journalists to travel to the area.
The Afghan government had called on the US military for help after its police and soldiers were caught up in heavy fighting with Taliban that erupted after the insurgents executed three civilians on charges of spying, officials have said.
If 70 non-combatants are confirmed to have been killed in Bala Buluk, it would make it one of the deadliest incidents for civilians in air strikes by US troops, who invaded nearly eight years ago to oust the Taliban regime.
The international forces in Afghanistan say they take extreme care to avoid harming civilians, aware it does enormous damage to their efforts to win the ordinary people over to their efforts against the Taliban.
There has been an angry reaction to the Farah incident, with hundreds of protesters on Thursday chanting "Death to America" and demanding that US troops leave Afghanistan, witnesses said.
The military accuses the insurgents of deliberately using civilian positions as cover.
"When the insurgents use civilians as human shields and fire upon coalition force, there is a possibility of civilian casualties and we do everything we can to avoid that," Julian told AFP.
"In the strikes in Farah, we were firing on positions from which the combined force was receiving heavy fire."
In a vitriolic nearly 600-word statement posted on its website and addressed to the nation, the Taliban charged that foreign troops were killing civilians deliberately to make them give up their "resistance".
It warned that "shedding the blood of one innocent Afghan will in fact lead to the opening of a new invincible trench of revenge against the infidel aggressors."
Source: AFP Global Edition
