The medical charity Doctors Without Borders has raised the death toll to 30 in the October 3 U.S. bombing of a trauma hospital in northern Afghanistan.
In a statement Saturday, the medical group, known by its French acronym MSF, attributed the new toll to seven additional unidentified bodies later found in the wreckage of the hospital at Kunduz.
In an earlier accounting, MSF said 10 patients and 13 known staff were killed when U.S. fighter jets hit the facility. Authorities said the U.S. attack came after Afghan forces called in airstrikes against Taliban fighters thought to be firing from inside the hospital grounds.
Meanwhile, NATO said it had appointed a panel to ensure that an ongoing U.S. investigation of the bombing was conducted in "an independent and unbiased manner."
Brigadier General Wilson Shoffner, U.S. deputy chief of staff for communications in Afghanistan, said in a statement from Kabul that both inquiries were examining "a series of potential human errors" and technical mishaps that might have contributed to "the mistaken strike" at the hospital. He said each probe was separate and that findings in one investigation would not be influenced by those in the other.
