An Afghan wedding party looked like a slaughterhouse after being attacked by US warplanes this week, survivors say.
"I saw bodies flying like straws," said Haleema, an old woman brought to hospital in Kandahar. "I had to jump over six bodies to escape."
US military investigators arrived in the remote village in central Afghanistan today to determine what had happened. Accompanied by two Afghan government ministers, several tribal elders and an embassy official, they spent two hours at the site.
Anger over the incident grew among Afghans, a factor which could complicate the task of the US military as it tracks down al Qaeda and Taliban fugitives hiding in the countryside.
The Afghan government says wedding guests near the village of Deh Rawud were firing into the air - a tradition at Pashtun weddings - when they were mistakenly bombed by US forces.
Locals said they had buried at least 30 people after the attack, but feared many more were still lying under the rubble.
"A piece of iron sliced the woman's neck in front of me," said Naseema, a 15-year-old girl, told reporters in hospital in the city of Kandahar where she had been brought for treatment. "In a split second her head was not on her body."
Another woman, who declined to give her name, said: "It was like an abattoir. There was blood everywhere. There was smoke and dirt all around, and people were running helter skelter. It was a doomsday scene."
The bride and groom were thought to have died in the raid, but the groom showed up on Wednesday to meet investigators who arrived to look into the incident, according to a pool report filed by US forces magazine Stars and Stripes.
The groom, identified as Malick, told a reporter that he and his fiancee were due to be married the following day, and had been in a different village when the planes struck.
He said he came back to find 25 members of his family dead, including his father and several brothers and sisters.