The United States military is paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to wounded survivors and relatives of the 42 Afghans killed when an American AC-130 gunship attacked a hospital run by Doctors Without Borders (MSF), which says the “sorry money” doesn’t compensate for the loss of life.
The payments amount to $6,000 for each person killed, with the wounded receiving $3,000 each, representatives of the victims of the Oct 3 bombing told The Associated Press.
All 460 staff who were employed at the hospital at the time of the attack are expected to receive some amount of cash compensation.
US forces in Afghanistan have “expressed their condolences and offered a condolence payment to more than 140 families and individuals,” the spokesman for the US military in Afghanistan, US army Colonel Mike Lawhorn, said.
He refused to give further details.
The trauma hospital was attacked during a firefight as US advisers were helping Afghan forces retake Kunduz from the Taliban, who had captured the northern city on Sept 28 and held it for three days.
Of the dead, 14 were hospital staff, 24 were patients, and 14 were caretakers, mostly relatives of patients. Another 27 staff were wounded. The hospital was destroyed and the charity, ceased operations in Kunduz.
President Barack Obama apologised for the attack, which was one of the deadliest assaults on civilians in the 15-year war.
The commander of US and NATO troops in Afghanistan, General John F Campbell, called it a mistake. Internal military investigations have not been made public.
A joint US-NATO assessment, obtained by The Associated Press, says the AC-130 gunship fired 211 shells at the compound for a half-hour before commanders realised the mistake and halted fire.
Contrary to initial claims by Afghan officials, the report says there was no evidence the hospital had been overrun by Taliban gunmen or that there were hostilities there.
A parallel investigation by the US military produced a 3,000-page report that officials say will be made public after it has been redacted. They have not given a firm date for its release.
Guilhem Molinie, MSF’s representative in Afghanistan, said the information in the reports has not been shared with the charity. “We are still totally in the dark on what happened on that night in Kunduz,” he said.
He said his group has discussed the “sorry money” with the US military, calling the amount of the payments “ridiculous.”
He said many of the families had lost their sole breadwinner and that the funds would run out soon.
“These amounts are absolutely not compensation for loss of life,” he said.
As condolence payments, these small amounts are seen as adequate to cover basic costs such as funerals, rather than as compensation, or blood money, for the deaths and injuries caused by the attack.
The United States has paid blood money up to $50,000 per death in some incidents, such as the multiple killing of Afghan civilians by a US soldier in 2013.
The amount paid is assessed on a case-by-case basis. The Afghan government of former President Hamid Karzai paid compensation to the family of each person killed due to the conflict of 100,000 afghanis, or about $1,500 at current exchange rates.
The office of President Ashraf Ghani did not respond to a request for information.