Pakistan rejects NATO attack report

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan has rejected as bias the U.S. report on the last month’s NATO attack on its two border posts, which had killed 24 soldiers.

The November 26 NATO strike in Mohmand tribal region, bordering Afghanistan, has caused a severe blow to the Pakistan-U.S. relations.

The US investigation report has been rejected on the basis that with US Brigadier General Stephen Clark as head, the investigation can never bring out unbiased findings, the sources said.

Pakistan has dismissed the report as the head of investigating team Brigadier General Stephen Clark has been linked to the strategic team involved in the attack.

“Pakistan believes that General Clark is an inappropriate choice to carry out investigation as a neutral party”.

The U.S. defence department the Pentagon says that an American official in Islamabad had delivered the report to Pakistan army chief General Ashfaq Kayani on Sunday.

The army spokesman Major General Athar Abbas has confirmed receiving of the report.

The full report from the joint US-Nato investigative team was not released publicly until Monday to allow time for the Pakistani leadership to read the findings first, the Pentagon spokesman said in Washington.

"We wanted General Kayani to be able to see the entire thing," he said. The approach represented "an appropriate professional courtesy" to Kayani, he added.

A military investigation has concluded that it took about 90 minutes for NATO officers to notify a senior commander about Pakistan’s calls that its outposts were under attack, underscoring a lack of timely senior-level “override” measures to avoid deadly cross-border errors like last month’s air strikes that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers.

But by then, military communications between the two sides had sorted out a chain of errors and the shooting had already stopped.

The delays — by two different officers — raise questions about whether a faster response could have spared the lives of Pakistani soldiers.

An unclassified version of the report, released on Monday by the military’s Central Command on its website, also revealed for the first time that an American AC-130 gunship flew two miles into Pakistani territory.

The United States and Pakistan disagree about the sequence of events in the cross-border attack.