KABUL: A US aircraft attacked a Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) clinic in the Afghan city of Kunduz because of “human error,” a US military inquiry said on Wednesday.

The crew of a US warplane that repeatedly pummeled the medical charity’s hospital in northern Afghanistan last month, killing and wounding dozens of civilians, misidentified the target, believing it to be a government compound taken over by the Taliban, according to an investigation report obtained Wednesday.

The report said the crew of the US AC-130 gunship relied on a physical description of the compound provided by Afghan forces, which led the crew to attack the wrong target. It said the intended target, thought to be under Taliban control and being used in part as a prison, was 450 yards (meters) away from the hospital. Investigators found no evidence that the crew or the US Special Forces commander on the ground who authorized the strike knew the targeted compound was a hospital at the time of the attack. That does not necessarily absolve them of blame, however, and a follow-up US military investigation will determine any disciplinary action.

The plane fired 211 shells at the compound over a 25-minute period before commanders realized the mistake and ordered a halt, it says. The Doctors Without Borders charity that runs the hospital contacted coalition military personnel during the attack to say their facility was “being ‘bombed’ from the air,” and the word finally was relayed to the AC-130 crew, the report said.

The report says the attack on Oct. 3 in the city of Kunduz killed at least 31 civilians and wounded 28 others. Investigators determined that additional civilians likely were killed or injured.

The investigation, known officially as a combined civilian casualty assessment, was led by US Army Brig. Gen. Richard Kim and was comprised of representatives of NATO and the Afghan government. It was charged with determining facts surrounding the incident but not to assign blame.

A subsequent US military investigation was done to look further at the case and to determine accountability. Gen. John Campbell, the top US commander in Afghanistan, was scheduled to make a public statement Wednesday about the further investigation. Officials said they intended to release a summary of that probe but not the full report, which is about 3,000 pages.

The Kim investigation report said that an Afghan ground assault force would raid a National Directorate of Security compound in Kunduz that night. The NDS is Afghanistan’s national intelligence agency.

The Afghans identified the intelligence agency compound as a Taliban insurgent command and control site, the report said. The AC-130 aircrew, however, for a variety of reasons thought the Afghans were referring to the compound that turned out to be the hospital. The coordinates for the target were passed on to the aircrew by an American terminal attack controller, including a reference to the target as also being a prison. “However, the aircrew was unable to identify the objective when the grid reference was programmed into the AC-130’s fire control system,” the report said.

“This led the aircrew to rely heavily on the physical description subsequently provided” by the Afghans to the American air controller to identify the target compound.

“Other contributing factors to the misidentification of the MSF compound include that the maps used by the (US Special Force commander) did not label the MSF compound as containing a medical facility, and that the MSF medical facility was not marked so as to distinguish it as a protected medical establishment,” the report said.