Errors confirmed in raid accounts

WELLINGTON: Both the New Zealand Defence Force and the authors of Hit & Run have been told by the villagers said to have been on the receiving end of a deadly attack that they have got the location and the names wrong — but the villagers maintain six civilians were killed.

In a letter to Prime Minister Bill English, lawyer Richard McLeod said: ‘‘Our clients are locals and residents of this area, and of course they know the names of the villages in which they live.’’

The lawyers also say the Defence Force has botched details of the location of the villages but that their clients have agreed with the military that the raid happened in the area identified at a Defence Force briefing this week.

Hit & Run, by Nicky Hager and Jon Stephenson, claimed the New Zealand Special Air Service (SAS) carried out a raid in August 2010 on the villages of Naik and Khak Khuday Dad, which killed six civilians and injured 15.

The Defence Force said the SAS had never operated in those villages but carried out a raid on nearby Tirgiran Village, 2km away.

It said the mission was not one of ‘‘revenge’’, as the authors claimed, but to remove a threat to New Zealand’s Provincial Reconstruction Team in neighbouring Bamiyan province.

Two weeks before the raid, New Zealand suffered its first casualty in Afghanistan, when Lieutenant Tim O’Donnell was killed in a raid believed to have come from combatants in the Tirgiran Valley.

Mr McLeod said their clients had viewed the Defence Force material and claimed it contained major inaccuracies.

‘‘Tirgiran is not a village, and therefore ‘Tirgiran Village’ does not exist,’’ the letter stated.

Instead, Mr McLeod’s letter said Naik and Khak Khuday Dad villages were inside the area on the Defence Force’s map that identified the target areas for the SAS raid.

The villages labelled by the Defence Force — and also by Hit & Run — as Naik and Khak Khuday Dad — had been labelled incorrectly and were actually villages called Beidak and Khakandy, respectively.

The letter was made public by the lawyers shortly before the release of an ‘‘analysis’’ by Hager of the Defence Force press conference this week.

In it, he confirms the book places the villages in the wrong location but said the Defence Force was wrong on all other major points.

‘‘Our conclusion is that the NZDF criticisms are wrong — with one exception — and that they have failed to address almost everything of substance in the book. This is what a coverup looks like.’’

Hager said the ‘‘location of the raid and the villages is indeed slightly different to what our local sources told us’’.

But he said it ‘‘does not change the story in any significant way’’.

Prime Minister Bill English yesterday made his strongest comments defending New Zealand’s military against allegations contained in the book, saying it was not up to officials to disprove every claim made by Hager and Stephenson.

Mr English also revealed the camera footage cited by Defence Chief Lieutenantgeneral Tim Keating as proof SAS raids in Afghanistan were properly conducted belongs to the US military.

‘‘It may or may not be possible for that to be released. They are responsible to their national command, not to us. That is the sort of issue that the CDF is working through.’’

Although there was no case for an inquiry into alleged war crimes, Mr English said Ltgen Keating was required by law to consider other allegations ‘‘and make a decision on whether there is basis for an inquiry, and he is still working through that’’. — NZME