By Judy Aita
Washington File United Nations Correspondent

United Nations -- A UN report concerning the July 1 bombing by U.S. planes of a village in Uruzgan, Afghanistan, was an assessment of relief needs and not a human rights probe of the incident, a UN spokesman said July 30.

UN spokesman Fred Eckhard said that the initial intention of UN special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, head of the UN Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), in sending a UN team to the site immediately after the bombing, "was to gather information on what was needed in the way of humanitarian assistance ... It was primarily a humanitarian fact-finding mission."

Questioned intensely at his daily press briefing, Eckhard explained that the humanitarian aid specialists sent to the scene within hours of the incident "picked up information that would be of use in (an) investigation" and the UN special envoy has sent that on to U.S. and Afghan investigators.

Brahimi "had humanitarians finding out as best they could what had happened on the political and military side, and that has its drawbacks," the spokesman said.

When Brahimi got the initial report, he asked the team to "substantiate" its data, Eckhard said. Once the findings had been substantiated, Brahimi "decided this could be of value to those conducting a proper investigation. Because the investigation by the two governments was already underway, he decided not to launch one of his own."

Eckhard said he knew of no effort by the United States to have the UN report suppressed.

"I have seen no evidence of communication between either the U.S. Government or the Afghan Government trying to influence our conduct of this fact-finding mission or of what we do with the results," the spokesman said.

Both the initial report and the second report requested by Brahimi "were sent as part of routine cable traffic" to UN headquarters, he said.

"There is no suspicion (at UN headquarters) of any cover-up" by UN officials in Afghanistan, Eckhard said.

Press reports July 29 said that a draft UN report leaked to news agencies suggest that the United States covered up evidence. The bombing took place in the Uruzgan region in central Afghanistan on July 1 when an US gunship fired on what the crew thought was hostile ground fire. Reports of the number of civilians -- who were celebrating a wedding -- killed and wounded has varied from 48 killed to the number of injured as high as 200.

A statement issued by UNAMA in Kabul said that "we would like to stress for the record that the United Nations was not involved in either an inquiry or an investigation but (was) simply responding to humanitarian needs as it does everywhere in the world in similar situations."

A report was produced "to determine what assistance would be required and could be provided" to those in the area, the UNAMA statement said.

Eckhard said that the humanitarian workers "picked up information that would be of use in an investigation."

Before Brahimi issued his report, Eckhard said, "the U.S. Government and the Afghan Government said they were going to jointly investigate. (Brahimi), therefore, rather than send a team of his own who might have competence in these areas (and) that might give the appearance of competing with these two governments' investigations, turned over what he had to them."

"He hopes that it will be helpful to them in their investigation," Eckhard said.

The spokesman acknowledged that it "might have been a mistake if we had published this thing with the UN seal on it saying here are the findings of the UN fact-finding team."

Turning the information over to the United States and Afghanistan, he said, "is a recognition that some of the things that (the investigators) were pronouncing themselves on were things that they weren't professionally qualified to make judgments on. But at the same time, to the extent that they can be accurate on reporting what people said to them, they can be gathering information that can be of help to professional investigators."

"The more time that passes, the less validity that witnesses' recollections have. When you get them fresh and you hear their accounts of what they saw and heard it has more validity than if you interviewed them a week later. So in that sense, I would think -- you would have to ask the Americans and Afghans what they think -- that this information gathered by humanitarian workers, not experts...would still have validity for an investigation," Eckhard said.

The incident took place in the middle of the night and UN workers were on the scene by noon, the spokesman said.

"The first report was quite telegraphic in format," he said. "The kind of things someone would bang out quickly and send to headquarters: we saw this, people said that."