An expert group assembled to investigate the murder of Finnish peacekeeper Jarno Tapio Mäkinen in Khiam, Lebanon on July 25th 2006 has completed its report and handed it over to the Finnish Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen today.
They concluded the attack on the United Nations base did result from an error and that there is no evidence of it being done intentionally.
The expert group asked followup questions from both the United Nations and Israel. None of the questions were answered.
One has to assume one of those questions would’ve been why did Israel continue shelling the UN base after the United Nations repeatedly asked them to stop. In fact reports indicate they continued shelling the area even when a separate United Nations group came in to recover the bodies from the bunker.
Apparently the root cause for the error was errors in manually entered target coordinates and outdated or missing information about the location of the UN base in the area.
Before the precision guided bomb hit the base, the peacekeepers in the base had reported Israeli grenade launchers had four direct hits on the base. The information was relayed to the Israelis, but they continued shelling the area eventually leading into the release of the precision guided bomb that hit the base.
I’ve written about the Khiam murders before:
Israel murders Jarno Tapio Mäkinen, a Finnish UN peacekeeper, in Khiam, Lebanon
-TPP
