AN AFGHAN OFFICIAL has claimed that the US has paid out $50,000 for each of the victims killed in a recent gun attack on neighbouring Afghan villages.

One US soldier has been arrested and charged on suspicion of carrying out the attacks which killed 16 people, including nine children, early on 11 March. Some of the bodies of the victims were burned by their attacker.

The AP reports that an Afghan official and a community elder say that $50,000 has been paid out to the families of each person killed in the shootings, and $11,000 paid to each injured survivor.

While a US official today confirmed that compensation had been paid, they would not discuss the amount offered to the victims’ families.

The shootings have damaged already-troubled relations between the US and Afghan governments, particularly as locals dispute the US military’s assertion that one soldier carried out the attacks single-handedly. Residents say that the homes which were attacked are too far apart for one gunman to have entered both and carried out the killings.

Though Afghan officials have noted 16 dead in the night raids, the US military has charged Staff Sgt Robert Bales with 17 murders in relation to the attacks without explaining the discrepancy in the figures.

His lawyer John Henry Browne has said that Bales remembers little about the night of the attacks.

- Additional reporting by the AP

US soldier kills 16 Afghans as crisis deepens >