Us-led coalition cannot rule out carrying out air strike at factory that left 50 dead

THE Us-led coalition has said it cannot confirm whether it was behind an air strike that killed more than 50 people in a Syrian town held by Isil.

The attack targeted an ice factory east of Sousa, a few miles from the Iraq border on Thursday night, killing 28 civilians and 26 fighters of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil).

The death toll could rise because dozens more had been critically wounded, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Uk-based monitor, said.

Anti-isil activists claimed the dead were Iraqis who had been displaced by fighting.

The Syrian foreign ministry called the attack a “massacre” and an act of aggression by the “illegal coalition”, without providing evidence the coalition was responsible.

The civilian casualty toll was one of the highest in a single raid against Isil since the offensive against the jihadists in Mosul, Iraq, ended last summer.

Colonel Sean Ryan, a spokesman for the coalition, said that it or “partner forces may have conducted strikes in the vicinity”. The coalition has publicly admitted causing 892 civilian deaths since starting an anti-isil operation in 2014.

Airwars, a monitoring group, says the number of civilian deaths acknowledged by the coalition is well below the true toll, estimating that at least 6,259 non-combatants have lost their lives. ♦ A Tunisian man, who was allegedly a bodyguard to Osama bin Laden was deported from Germany yesterday, more than a decade after his asylum bid was first rejected, officials said.

The 42-year-old, identified as Sami A, had lived in Germany for more than two decades. German authorities first rejected his asylum request in 2007 but efforts to expel him were repeatedly blocked by courts citing the danger of torture in Tunisia.