13 bodies recovered from aircraft crash site

THE bodies of 13 American troops have been recovered from the crash of a US helicopter in eastern Afghanistan, but seven more soldiers are unaccounted for and some may have been captured.

A report on the BBC quoted unidentified US military officials on the recovery of the bodies from the site of Tuesday's crash in Kunar province.

The BBC said officials said there was hope some of those unaccounted for were alive but it also quoted correspondent Andrew North as saying they may have been captured by insurgents.

The report said some of those unaccounted for had been soldiers who had been fighting on the ground. It said North was at the US military base at Asadabad, capital of Kunar.

General Aminullah Patyani, army commander for eastern Afghanistan, told Reuters "a few bodies" had been found at the crash site in the Dar-e-Paich area about 30km (19 miles) northwest of Asadabad, but he did not know how many. He said the search was still going on and he had no information about US troops being captured.

A US official said in Washington on Wednesday that all 17 US troops aboard the helicopter, who included elite US Navy Seals, were presumed to have died in the crash.

The MH-47 Chinook helicopter, a Special Forces variant of the US military's CH-47 twin-rotor workhorse, crashed after being hit by insurgent fire, the US military said.

A statement from the military said US forces had secured the crash site and were "assessing the cause of the crash and the status of the 17 service members".

It said US-led forces were continuing an anti-militant operation codenamed "Redwing" in Kunar, but gave no details.

US spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Jerry O'Hara said work at the crash site had been hampered by the presence of militants in the area, cloudy weather and rugged, heavily wooded terrain.

The Chinook, which crashed during an anti-al-Qaida operation, was probably struck by a rocket-propelled grenade, General Peter Pace, vice-chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a Congressional hearing in Washington on Wednesday.

Taliban spokesman Abdul Latif Hakimi said the guerrillas shot down the Chinook with "a new type of weapon" which he did not describe. Hakimi, whose information has been unreliable in the past, said on Wednesday the guerrillas had killed seven US "spies" in the area before shooting down the helicopter.

In early June, the US military said a helicopter had been attacked in Uruzgan province by a suspected surface-to-air missile. Such weapons, supplied by the United States, were used to great effect by guerrillas fighting Soviet occupiers in the 1980s but the Taliban have not been known to use them.