Associated Press
WASHINGTON — U.S. soldiers who scoured the site of a CIA-directed missile attack in Afghanistan found evidence disputing claims that those killed were innocents, a senior Pentagon official said Monday.
Rear Adm. John Stufflebeem, deputy director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said a team of more than 50 U.S. military personnel recovered ammunition, an empty box for a hand-held radio, English-language documents — including credit card applications and commercial airline schedules — and pieces of human remains.
They also checked in nearby caves and villages and talked with locals before leaving the area Monday, he said.
"These were not innocents," he said, while acknowledging that their identities are not known.
Villagers have said that the victims were peasants who were gathering scrap metal from the war when a Hellfire missile launched from a pilotless aircraft operated by the Central Intelligence Agency shrieked out of the sky Feb. 4 and killed the men.
Responding to that report, Victoria Clarke, chief spokeswoman for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, said, "We haven’t seen or heard anything that leads us to believe that it was anything other than what we thought the target was."
In other developments:
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