Eyewitness: Villager describes attack

The villager, Abdul Saboor, contradicted US military statements about the circumstances of the attack in the Uruzgan province in which, US officials say, 30 people were killed.

Mr Saboor told the BBC's World Today programme that villagers were celebrating a wedding ceremony in a private home when suddenly, there was an attack by aircraft.

Mr Saboor said as a result of the bombing, he thought between 120 and 150 people, all civilians, were killed.

He said scores of other men, women and children were wounded in the attack.

Unattended dead

"We are not sure who informed the planes and why they bombed," Mr Saboor said, "as there were no al-Qaeda or Taleban here."

Mr Saboor said the bombs fell around one in the morning.

The wounded were loaded into private cars and taken to hospital in Kandahar, the largest city in south-eastern Afghanistan.

He said some of the wounded were escorted by locally-based aid workers, but the dead were left unattended throughout the night.

Mr Saboor said whoever informed the airborne attackers and guided the raid was wrong.

"They were all civilians here," he said, "they were peasants, not Taleban, al-Qaeda or Arabs."

'Soaked with blood'

Helicopters with "foreigners", presumably Americans, arrived in the morning, and the remaining wounded were flown to hospital.

Among the aid workers helping with the treatment at Kandahar hospital was Sarah Chase, a member of Afghans for Civil Society, a non-governmental organisation active in the region.

She told the BBC she had seen three wounded Afghans arrive after a nine-hour drive.

They told here other wounded villagers were in cars following theirs.

"I saw a small girl suffering from what looked like a shrapnel, or something like that, in her abdomen," she said.

"She had a bandage to her hip area, and her dress was pretty soaked with blood."