(Previous Incident Code: Ob202 )

In this major – and widely reported – US strike in Date Khel north Waziristan, up to 50 people were killed, possibly all civilians, including some children, and many left wounded, local and international media reported, though the US claimed only militants were killed.

Coming just two days after the release of CIA contractor Raymond Davis from a Lahore jail after he killed two locals, this disastrous US drone strike brought relations between the two nations to a new low. Missiles from a drone struck a gathering of as many as 50 men in Datta Khel, the highest reported by Nieman Watchdog.

US officials, cited by New York Times, claimed that the men were all legitimate targets, with one stating “These people weren’t gathering for a bake sale. They were terrorists.” Another, cited by Wall Street Journal insisted: “These guys were terrorists, not the local men’s glee club.”

However, it soon became clear that the CIA had targeted a tribal jirga, a formal gathering to resolve a local dispute. An internal record of CIA drone strikes in Pakistan, collected by the local authority, listed up to 41 civilians killed in this attack. The document, published by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) in January 2014, said: “The attack was carried out on a Jirga and it is feared that all the killed [41] were local tribesmen.”

Held in the Nomada bus depot, the meeting was attended by maliks – tribal leaders – along with government officials and local policemen, eyewitnesses told Stanford/NYU researchers. The attendees were seated in “two large circles about 12 feet apart” and were discussing the disagreement when a first missile “fired from a US drone hovering above” struck one of the circles at around 10.45am. Ahmed Jan told the researchers “he remembered hearing the hissing sound the missiles made just seconds before they slammed into the centre of his group.” “Several” further missiles rained down on the jirga, with at least one hitting the second group, the Stanford/NYU researchers found.

Jalal Manzar Khail told Reprieve he heard two missiles hit the ground and saw two more shortly afterwards. He arrived at the scene soon after the strike – the injured were rushed to hospital and he had to “[put] body parts in different boxes… [Using] boxes as coffins.” In June 2013 he told the independent filmmakers, cited by Huffington Post four of his cousins were killed in the strike in additional to four other civilians, all listed below.

A total of 33 victims were identified by name by a range of sources, all claiming that they were civilians. 18 of the killed were identified by the BIJs’ field researchers.

Also, further civilians were identified by name in sworn affidavits from multiple witnesses to the strike, filed in the London High Court in March 2012, also cited by TBIJ.

Both The News and Xinhua said that children were among the killed.

“We were told in plain words that none of the elders that had attended survived. They were all destroyed, all gone,’” Khalil Khan told Stanford/NYU researchers, adding that all he could do to bury his father was “collect pieces of flesh and put them in a coffin.” “Nearly all those killed were the heads of large households,” the Stanford/NYU researchers note, adding that this sudden loss caused many of their bereaved family members severe financial difficulties. The Pakistani government offered families three lakhs (approximately $3,200) in compensation, witnesses told interviewers, but most said they had refused it. “[O]ur elders were worth much more than that… [W]e had lost an entire community of elders,” they told researchers.

Uniquely Pakistan’s president, prime minister and army chief all publicly condemned this attack. News later emerged that the US Ambassador to Islamabad had personally tried to halt the strike, only to be over-ruled by the CIA’s chief. A US official reportedly claimed that the attack was ‘in retaliation’ for the imprisonment of Davis. Although up to 11 Taliban were said by some to be among the dead, up to 38 civilians were also reported killed, including tribal elders and local policemen. TBIJ’s researchers in Waziristan reported: “Several members of the government-managed and armed Khassadar force were present at the jirga because the government had got involved in resolving a dispute between two contractors who mined chromite in the nearby hills.”

The CIA continued to claim that no civilians died in the attack. A US official commenting on the Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s findings, stated: “There’s no question the Pakistani and U.S. governments have different views on the outcome of this strike. The fact is that a large group of heavily armed men, some of whom were clearly connected to Al Qaeda and all of whom acted in a manner consistent with A.Q.-linked militants, were killed.”

Confusion remains about how many people died that day. At the time, Taliban sources told the Express Tribune that 12 of its members had died out of 26 killed in total. In February 2012 Associated Press published a report of the incident based on extensive field research, stating that only four attendees appeared to have been Taliban. It also listed a fresh US counter-claim:

“Citing the number visible in the monitoring before and during the attack, US officials said the total of dead was roughly half what villagers reported. But [local farmer Gul] Ahmed said there were 42 caskets lined up at the funeral, and he provided the victims’ names.”

In the same month, a joint investigation by the BIJ and the Sunday Times cited Pakistan’s military commander in Waziristan at the time, Brigadier Abdullah Dogar: “We in the Pakistan military knew about the meeting, we’d got the request 10 days earlier. It was held in broad daylight, people were sitting out in Nomada bus depot when the missile strikes came. Maybe there were one or two Taliban at that Jirga – they have their people attending – but does that justify a drone strike which kills 42 mostly innocent people?”