'They were shooting at people running away'

THE celebrations were in full swing, with hundreds of guests preparing for a wedding singing and dancing in the beam of a tractor’s headlights. Out of the darkness a warplane descended, sending rockets exploding through the crowd.
Survivors of the party in Kakarak, southern Afghanistan, yesterday described the events after they came under fire in the early hours of Monday from American gunships. They told of a sustained attack from the air, with wedding guests being chased and shot dead as they tried to escape.

“The first rocket hit the women’s section. The second rocket hit the men’s section,” Ahmed Jan Agha, a musician who was playing at the wedding, told Associated Press in Kakarak. “Then everybody started running. The aeroplanes were shooting rockets at the people running away. They were chasing us.”

Many of those who died had been cut down by shrapnel as they tried to seek shelter from the barrage. “A piece of iron sliced the woman’s neck in front of me. In a split- second it was not on her body,” Naseema, a 15-year-old survivor, told Reuters from hospital in Kandahar, where she was taken for treatment.

“It was like an abattoir,” another survivor, who would not give her name, said. “There was blood everywhere.”