Warplane that attack Doctors Without Borders hospital in Afghanistan was

Many believe the hospital was clearly marked and identifiable with Christopher Stokes, the general director of Doctors Without Borders, saying the “mistake is quite hard to understand and believe at this stage”, at a news conference in Kabul this month.

The USA military offered a series of shifting explanations for the attack before President Barack Obama admitted in a call to MSF chief Joanne Liu that it had been a mistake and apologised.

Twenty-two people, including 12 staff members, died after a United States warplane mistakenly destroyed the clinic run by aid organisation Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), or Doctors Without Borders.

At least 30 people were killed in the October attack, including patients and medical staff.

The newspaper cites an unnamed senior US Defense Department official, who it says was briefed on an internal investigation. “We are absoutely heartbroken”, said Shoffner, adding that the USA military in Afghanistan will ensure “it does not happen again”.

He summarized the findings of the military’s investigation but did not release the full report.

When the call for help came from the Afghan troops, a USA special forces team in another part of Kunduz called in the strike. The MSF hospital was 450 yards away from that compound.

“Such mistakes can and should be avoided”, he said in a statement. That meant the aircraft launched without a mission briefing.

The aircraft identified the building based on a visual description provided by Afghan forces, he said, and did not refer to coordinates provided by MSF for inclusion on a “no-strike list”. The American AC-130 gunship thought the description relayed to him matched the building, which turned out to be the hospital. But when they entered them into the degraded systems, they correlated to an open field 300 metres (1,000 feet) from the target. But no Americans on the ground were in position to see the hospital.

“The personnel who requested the strike and those who executed it from the air did not undertake appropriate measures to verify that the facility was a legitimate military target”, he said.

He said that the crew of the AC-130 plane believed the building was a government compound, the NDS (or National Directorate of Security), which had been taken over by Taliban militants. But it’s unclear exactly what those consequences might be.

The investigation also points to a technical error in a mapping system that led USA fighter jets to attack the wrong target.

As Tom notes, there has also been no explanation why the gunship crew would continue to fire – for about half an hour, according to the Pentagon – at a target that was not firing back. His spokesman, Brig. Gen. Wilson Shoffner, said those who called in and carried out the airstrike violated USA rules of engagement and used force that was disproportionate to the threat – language that suggests a possible worldwide law violation.