NATO force in Afghanistan drops ammo into wrong hands: statement

KABUL (AFP) ? NATO admitted on Thursday that a helicopter mistakenly dropped military supplies in the wrong place in southern Afghanistan and that they had subsequently disappeared.

Afghan media said the ammunition including rocket-propelled grenades as well as food and water was seized by Taliban militants, but NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) did not say who took the supplies.

"On March 25, a private helicopter company was contracted, on behalf of an ISAF unit, to resupply an Afghan National Police (ANP) outpost located in a remote mountain area" of Zabul provine, an ISAF statement said.

"Unfortunately, due to a human error in transcribing the latitude and longitude of the location, the load was dropped in another remote area," it added.

The "forces sent aircraft for a visual reconnaissance, however, the missing cargo could not be found," it said without elaborating on who might have seized the load.

Afghan media citing local officials and a parliamentarian from the troubled province, a hotbed of insurgent activity, have reported that the weapons were taken by the Taliban.

The Taliban were ousted from power in a US-led invasion in late 2001 and are waging an insurgency against the government and international forces based here.

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