More Than 100 Killed in Afghan Clashes

Afghans search and retrieve remains of victims in a wrecked bus following a bomb blast in Kabul, Afghanistan on Sunday, June 17, 2007. A bomb ripped through a police bus in a bustling area of Kabul on Sunday, killing more than 35 people and wounding over 35 others, officials said, in one of the deadliest attacks in the Afghan capital since the fall of the Taliban. (AP Photo/Musadeq Sadeq) (Musadeq Sadeq - AP)

The governor said there normally is excellent coordination between the government and international forces but said he was not told of the missile strike in advance.

Authorities are working with foreign forces "to have better coordination and to not have these misunderstandings, but today we had a misunderstanding and the people will be unhappy," Akhpelwak told The Associated Press by telephone. "We will go to the area and discuss the issue with the people and apologize."

A coalition spokesman, Maj. Chris Belcher, said coalition troops had "surveillance on the compound all day and saw no indications there were children inside." Belcher, an American, accused the militants of not letting the children leave.

"If we knew that there were children inside the building, there was no way that that airstrike would have occurred," said Sgt. 1st Class Dean Welch, another coalition spokesman.

Reports of civilian deaths in Uruzgan were coming from various quarters.

One wounded man at the main Uruzgan hospital told the AP that 18 members of his family had been killed.

Mullah Ahmidullah Khan, the head of Uruzgan's provincial council, estimated the clashes in Chora killed 60 civilians, 70 suspected Taliban militants and 16 Afghan police.

"I have talked to President Karzai and asked him to send helicopters to ferry the wounded to Kabul," he said.

An official close to the governor who asked not to be identified when talking about preliminary estimates, said 70 to 75 civilians were killed or wounded, while more than 100 Taliban and more than 35 police were killed.

But Maj. John Thomas, a NATO spokesman, said he doubted that Afghan officials could tell the difference between civilians and militants, suggesting some of the wounded who claimed to be civilians were insurgents.

Dr. Hajed Noor, a doctor at Uruzgan's main hospital in the provincial capital, Tirin Kot, said the hospital had received 34 wounded, including nine women and seven children. He said his patients reported that many other wounded were in the Chora district and couldn't make it to the hospital because of the fighting.

Speaking by phone from a hospital bed, Janu Akha, 62, said bombs hit his village of Qala-i-Ragh on Saturday.

"Eight bombs fell in my village," Akha said. "On Sunday my relatives buried 18 members of my family, including women and children."

Khan, the Uruzgan provincial council chief, said he talked to a man named Gul Mohammad at the Tirin Kot hospital who said 15 relatives, including women and children, had been killed. "I also saw Manan Jan in the hospital. He had 12 family members killed," Khan said.

Another doctor at the hospital, Mohammad Fahim, said: "Most of the people who were killed are still there (in Chora). They are not bringing the bodies here, so that is why we do not know how many have been killed."

In the capital, Kabul, police said they detained a suspect in connection with a bus bombing Sunday that killed at least 35 people, most of them police trainers. The suspect, whose name and nationality were not disclosed, had pictures of slain Taliban leader Mullah Dadullah in his phone, as well as text messages from a foreign country, police said.

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Associated Press reporters Rahim Faiez, Amir Shah and Fisnik Abrashi in Kabul and Mike Corder in The Hague, Netherlands, contributed to this report.