Agencies/Washington/Kabul

The US investigation into a deadly October 3 strike on a hospital run by Medecins Sans Frontieres in the northern Afghan city of Kunduz concluded it was a tragic accident caused primarily by human error, a top US military commander said yesterday.
“This was a tragic mistake. US forces would never intentionally strike a hospital or other protected facilities,” US Army General John Campbell, the commander of international and US forces in Afghanistan, said at a news conference to announce the results of the investigation.
Campbell said the individuals closest to the incident have been suspended from their duties.
The attack killed 22 people, including 12 MSF staff.
The investigation found that US forces, partly because of a technical error, misidentified the hospital and believed they were striking another building in the city.
The US military confirmed that Medecins Sans Frontieres, also known as Doctors Without Borders, had called 12 minutes into the strike to inform the US-led coalition that they were under attack.
Brigadier General Wilson Shoffner, the deputy chief of staff for communication for international forces in Afghanistan, said that by the time the US forces realised their mistake, the AC-130 gunship had stopped firing on the MSF facility.
“The investigation found that some of the US individuals involved did not follow the rules of engagement,” Shoffner said.   
Two military officials told the New York Times on Tuesday that a Special Operations AC-130 gunship aircraft hit the hospital instead of an Afghan intelligence compound hundreds of feet away that was thought to have been commandeered by Taliban fighters during their brief capture of the city.
The gunship’s crew relied on location information relayed to them by US and Afghan special forces rather than their aircraft’s instruments, according to the officials, who discussed the report on condition of anonymity ahead of its formal release.
MSF said yesterday it could not comment on the reports as it has not yet seen the results of the investigation.  
The officials’ account as quoted by the NYT does not address why the attack — which lasted more than one hour — was not halted despite frantic telephone calls from MSF staff, nor why US ground forces failed to intervene when they saw the wrong building being hit.
One official told the Times the crew did not receive a full preflight briefing that would have told them the Kunduz hospital was protected under the Geneva Convention.
The US military also failed to follow its own rules of engagement for calling air strikes — that American or Afghan troops must be in extreme danger — while the Special Operations Forces did not positively identify that the area targeted was legitimate, the paper said.
“There was certainly some confusion over what they were shooting at,” an official told the Wall Street Journal, which received a similar briefing. “If there wasn’t, then this wouldn’t have happened.”
MSF released short biographies of 14 staff members who died in the attack, including doctors, nurses, cleaners and guards. They were described as dedicated to their work and their country.