Up to 71 civilians were killed in a weekend strike by Pakistani jets near the Afghan border, survivors and a government official said Tuesday – a rare confirmation of civilian casualties that risks undercutting public support for the fight against militants. The government official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject, said authorities had already handed out the equivalent of $125,000 in compensation to families of the victims in a remote village in the Khyber tribal area. Also Tuesday, a village elder claimed 13 civilians had been killed in US missile strike Monday night elsewhere in the northwest, contesting accounts by Pakistani security officials that four militants were killed. Pakistan's tribal regions are largely out of bounds for reporters and dangerous to visit because of the likelihood of being abducted by militants, who still control much of the area, making it very difficult to verify casualty figures. Army spokesman Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas Monday denied that any of the dead in the Pakistani air force attack were civilians, saying the army had intelligence that militants were gathering at the site of the strike. The victims were initially reported to be suspected militants. Two survivors interviewed Tuesday in hospital in the main northwestern city of Peshawar gave the first detailed account of the attack, which took place Saturday morning. They said most of the victims were killed when they were trying to rescue people trapped by an earlier strike on the house of a village elder. “This house was bombed on absolutely wrong information,” said Khanan Gul Khan, a resident of the village who was visiting a relative in hospital. “This area has nothing to do with militants.” Khan said many of the families in the village, Sara Walla, had sons serving in the security forces and that it had a history of cooperating with the army. He said the owner of the house that was bombed initially, Hamid Khan, had two sons serving in the paramilitary Frontier Corps. He said 68 people were killed and many more wounded. The political official said Monday that the families of 71 victims had been compensated, but did not identify them. Dilla Baz Khan suffered a fractured arm in the second attack, which he said came around two hours after the first one. “We were about to pull out a lady from the rubble when another jet came and bombed us,” he said from the orthopedic ward of the Hayatabad medical complex in Peshawar. “Then I lost consciousness.” He said an official from the Khyber political administration visited him Monday and gave him $220 for the loss of four relatives, including his brother.
