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US warplane ‘cut down nurses as they fled’

Medical charity MSF has released chilling details from a devastating US bombing of an Afghan hospital, saying staff and patients had been decapitated and lost their limbs with some gunned down from the air.

The raid on October 3 in the northern city in Kunduz killed at least 30 people, sparking an avalanche of global condemnation and forcing the French-founded charity to close the trauma centre.

An AC-130 gunship repeatedly bombed the hospital for around an hour even as MSF staff sent out harrowing messages to officials in Kabul and Washington, informing them of heavy casualties, the charity said in an internal review of the strike released on Thursday.

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The review described patients burning in their beds, medical staff decapitated by shrapnel and a nurse who suffered a “traumatic amputation” in the attack.

People were shot at, apparently from the plane, as they tried to flee the burning building, with some eyewitnesses cited in the report saying the shooting appeared to follow those on the run.

“The view from inside the hospital is that this attack was conducted with a purpose to kill and destroy,” MSF general director Christopher Stokes said in Kabul.

MSF said the raid, which occurred after the Taliban’s brief but bloody capture of Kunduz, persistently targeted the main building housing the intensive care unit and emergency rooms despite desperate pleas to officials.

“At 2.56 am an SMS was sent from MSF in Kabul to Resolute Support [NATO] insisting that the air strikes stop and informing that we suspected heavy casualties,” read the report.

“At 2.59 am an SMS reply was received by MSF in Kabul from NATO saying ‘I’ll do my best, praying for you all.'”

Three separate investigations – led by the US, NATO and Afghan officials — are looking into the strike, but MSF has labelled the incident a war crime and demanded an independent probe by an international fact-finding commission.

The Pentagon had read the MSF review and was “committed to conducting investigations that are thorough and transparent”, Captain Jeff Davis, director of press operations, said in a statement.

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