US military briefs General Kayani on Nato attack report

The attack was the deadliest single cross-border attack of the 10-year war in Afghanistan.

WASHINGTON: The American military has briefed Pakistan's army chief on its investigation into US air strikes that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers on the Afghan border last month, officials said Tuesday.

A report by military investigators was delivered to General Ashfaq Kayani on Sunday by a US officer based in Islamabad, who explained the findings to the general, Pentagon spokesman Captain John Kirby told reporters.

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, Kirby said.

"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 summary of the report was released Thursday and the officer who led the investigation, Brigadier General Stephen Clark, briefed reporters by phone the same day.

The air strikes have damaged the precarious US-Pakistani partnership and provoked outrage in Islamabad, which has retaliated by cutting off NATO supply routes to Afghanistan.

The United States and Pakistan disagree about the precise sequence of events in the deadliest single cross-border attack of the 10-year war in Afghanistan.

Pakistan denies shooting first, and has accused the Americans of an intentional attack on its troops.

The US report provides more details on the November 25-26 air strikes that Clark says were the result of a series of mistakes and botched communications on both sides -- reflecting an underlying mistrust between the two countries.

It took the NATO-led force 84 minutes to halt air strikes after a Pakistani liaison officer first alerted US and coalition counterparts that Pakistani troops were coming under fire from American aircraft, the report said.

The probe also said the US military had failed to notify the Pakistanis in advance of the night raid near the border and that a coalition officer mistakenly gave the wrong location of the US troops to his Pakistani counterpart.

The probe found that Pakistani soldiers fired first at American and Afghan forces and kept firing even after a US F-15 fighter jet flew overhead. And the Pakistanis failed to tell the Americans about new borders posts in the area.

(Read: Beyond the Salala probe)