ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (KRT) — Four U.N. program workers on Tuesday became the first confirmed civilian casualties of the American-led war on terrorism, while a Taliban envoy said the movement’s top religious leader had escaped the U.S. air strikes.
The United Nations reported that a bomb or missile had killed four Afghan workers at the headquarters of a U.N.-affiliated group on the edge of Kabul.
The four were night guards with Afghan Technical Consultants, a nonprofit organization clearing landmines and unexploded ordnance, said Stephanie Bunker, spokeswoman for the U.N. Coordinator for Afghanistan.
Asked if it was a U.S. bomb, Bunker read from a report that said, “Due to air attack in Kabul City, a missile/bomb struck the ATC regional office in the outskirts of Kabul,” but declined to identify the source of the report.
U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said he could not confirm the report. “We have no information from the ground to verify this,” he said in Washington.
Meanwhile, Pakistani leader Pervez Musharraf continued to shake up his military, putting loyalists in command of areas on the Afghan border that are racked by anti-American riots.
Bunker expressed concern about the security of U.N. operations in Pakistan, where rioting by radical Muslims who were protesting the U.S. strikes killed at least three people Tuesday, including two men and a 13-year-old, who were shot as a mob tried to torch a police station near the southwestern city of Quetta.
The ATC compound in Yaka Toot, two miles east of Kabul, was struck about 9 p.m., Bunker added, a time when U.S. airplanes were overhead. News reports from the Afghan capital said the office is near a radio tower that might have been the target of an attack.
Abdul Salam Zaeef, the Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, said Tuesday that “dozens of innocent civilians” were killed in the raids, launched after the Taliban refused to surrender Osama bin Laden, the top suspect in the Sept. 11 terror attacks in the United States. The pro-Taliban Afghan Islamic Press quoted a government spokesman in Kabul as saying 35 civilians had been “killed or wounded.” But the deaths of the U.N. workers were the first independently confirmed cases of civilians killed in the air strikes.
Zaeef also said that Taliban religious leader Mullah Mohammed Omar survived U.S. attacks Monday on his home in the southeastern city of Kandahar, the spiritual capital of the hard-line Islamic movement. Zaeef’s comments bolstered reports that the U.S. raiders are targeting Omar, who holds no official post in the Taliban government and would be exempt from a ban on U.S. assassinations of foreign heads of state.
Afghan exiles in Pakistan say they had received reports that U.S. bombs on Sunday struck a housing compound 15 miles outside Kandahar that Omar used until a few weeks ago. Rumsfeld has said that some of the American raids would be aimed at “leadership” targets, but he avoided comments on whether U.S. forces were specifically targeting Omar.