Geolocation
Airwars assessment
Two civilian women were reportedly injured in a GNA airstrike on Tarhuna.
An Amnesty International investigation found: “On 27 April 2019, a GNA aircraft dropped a bomb on Tarhouna, in the courtyard of the al-Hbashi family, injuring two women and damaging the house. Umm Seif told Amnesty International:
‘I was at home alone with my daughters and my 13-year-old son. My husband had gone to Malaysia to bring home our oldest son who had been studying there for the past five years. My youngest boy had just left to go for private lessons when the bomb struck at the exact place where he had been playing just half an hour earlier. The whole house shook and fragments flew right through the inner rooms. My daughter Amani was injured in the face, throat and legs, and my other daughter fainted from the shock.’
In the adjacent house, 40-year-old Aaafia Salah showed Amnesty International the injuries she had sustained to the chest and limbs. She too was inside her home when the strike happened and was injured by fragments of masonry from the wall destroyed by the strike. Fragments recovered at the scene by Amnesty International investigators confirm the bomb was a FAB-500ShL, a 500kg unguided bomb called a “parachute bomb” by local residents because of the large white parachute that deploys out the back to slow and align the ordnance’s decent. This is a large explosive weapon, with a blast radius of over 800m, and therefore not an appropriate weapon to use in populated urban areas.”
Ali Alkasir reported: “Civilian houses in Tarhuna city were shelled by warplanes that left the Misrata Air Force College, wounding civilians and destroying their livelihoods.”
Other sources published similar accounts.
The local time of the incident is unknown.
The victims were named as:
Geolocation notes
Reports of the incident mention the neighbourhood of Al Na’aija (النعاعجة), for which the generic coordinates are: 32.366389, 13.686389. Due to limited satellite imagery and information available to Airwars, we were unable to verify the location further.