Air strike kills 14 Afghan workers

US-led coalition warplanes trying to target insurgents killed 14 Afghan road workers in an air strike in northwestern Afghanistan, a provincial governor said yesterday.
Another official said up to 25 of the men were killed in the bombing late Tuesday in an area of the rugged Nuristan province about 180 kilometres northeast of Kabul.
"We had reports that rebels were there," Nuristan governor Tamimi Nuristani told AFP.
"There was an air strike by coalition forces but later we found out that 12 people, all local road workers, were killed. The road workers were in a tent, which was hit by one bomb. All died," he said.
The US-led coalition media office said it was trying to find out what happened. "Something happened but we are not sure exactly what," spokesman Major Chris Belcher said.
The province's police chief said he was trying to verify the incident.
Nuristani said the men were from an Afghan construction company that was building a road in the remote area.
In another bombing in the same province, 12 militants were killed, the governor said.
The head of the Nuristan provincial council, Taj Mohammad, said 25 people were killed in the strikes and they were all civilian road workers.
"We collected their flesh and put it in bags. We handed the remains of the ones we could recognise to their families," he said.
Nuristan is an isolated mountain province on the border with Pakistan that has seen occasional fighting between security forces and the Taliban.
The US-led coalition helped remove the extremist Taliban from government in 2001 and is now working with the Afghan security forces and a separate NATO-led force to end an insurgency by the hardliners, who are allied with Al-Qaeda.
Civilian casualties in the international operation against the Taliban and other militants is a deeply sensitive issue and President Hamid Karzai has regularly urged military forces to take more care.
Several hundred civilians are believed to have been killed by international soldiers fighting the insurgents this year, but no official figure has been released.