NATO: 2 Afghan shooting victims were not necessarily insurgents

NATO backs down on ‘insurgent’ claim in shooting

KABUL — NATO is backing away from its claim that two unarmed Afghans who were fatally shot by alliance troops were insurgents.

NATO troops fired on a vehicle that approached their convoy in eastern Afghanistan on Monday night, killing four people. The day after the shooing, NATO said two of those killed were later identified as “known insurgents.”

President Hamid Karzai and the victims’ relatives immediately denied that and said they were all civilians.

On Wednesday, NATO said it should not have used the term “insurgents” to describe the two.

The initial claim was made because fingerprints taken from the two matched those found in a military biometric database. But their presence in the database does not necessarily mean they were insurgents.