Afghanistan’s President Ashraf Ghani has appointed a commission to investigate a U.S. airstrike in northern Kunduz city that destroyed a hospital and killed at least 22 people, his spokesman said on Saturday.
The five-man team would leave soon for Kunduz to look into the cause of the Oct. 3 airstrike on a trauma centre run by the international charity Doctors Without Borders, Mr. Ghani’s deputy spokesman Zafar Hashemi said.
The team would be led by the former head of the national intelligence agency Amrullah Saleh, he said, and would report to the President.
The airstrike was requested by Afghan ground forces, according to the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Gen. John F. Campbell, but mistakenly hit the hospital.
The bombing continued for about an hour and destroyed the hospital’s main building. President Barack Obama apologised and the U.S. military is investigating. The hospital has been abandoned.
Doctors Without Borders said that 12 staff members and 10 patients, all of them Afghans, were killed. Many more are still missing though all internationals have been accounted for.
Mr. Ghani met with representatives of Doctors Without Borders on Friday, his office said.
It made no mention of a call by Doctors Without Borders for an independent probe of the incident, specifically by the Swiss-based International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission which is made up of diplomats, legal experts, doctors and some former military officials from nine European countries, including Britain and Russia. It was created after the Gulf War in 1991, and has never deployed a fact-finding mission.
Mr. Stokes head of MSF said earlier that Doctors Without Borders a Nobel Peace Prize-winning organization that provides medical aid in conflict zones is awaiting responses to letters sent Tuesday to 76 countries that signed the additional protocol to the Geneva Conventions, asking to mobilize the 15-member commission.
For the IHFFC to be mobilized, a single country would have to call for the fact-finding mission, and the U.S. and Afghanistan which are not signatories must also give their consent.
