Doctors Without Borders Closes Afghan Hospital, Condemns 'U.S. War Crimes' (VIDEO)

Nobel Peace Prize update.

At the Los Angeles Times:

The medical charity Doctors Without Borders closed its hospital in the Afghan province of Kunduz on Sunday, and charged that a suspected U.S. airstrike that killed 22 people there appeared to have been a war crime.

The closure was a blow to the embattled northern province where more than 400 people have been injured in the last week in fighting between Afghan security forces and the Taliban. The group took control of the provincial capital briefly last week.

The Pentagon said there are three investigations into the airstrike, one by the Defense Department, one involving both the United States and Afghanistan, and one by NATO. Pentagon officials have thus far said only that a U.S. airstrike Saturday morning may have caused collateral damage.

Doctors Without Borders said it would be satisfied only with an investigation by an independent, outside authority.

The aid agency called the bombing, which went on for more than an hour, horrifying and said it had informed U.S. and Afghan officials of the hospital's GPS coordinates before the strike occurred.

Doctors Without Borders, also known as Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF) in French, said Sunday that the death toll had risen to 22 — 12 staff members and 10 patients, three of them children. The toll was an increase of three over the figure announced previously. In addition, dozens of people were injured.

“Under the clear presumption that a war crime has been committed, MSF demands that a full and transparent investigation into the event be conducted by an independent international body,” the organization said in a statement on its website. “Relying only on an internal investigation by a party to the conflict would be wholly insufficient.”

Senior Pentagon officials said the three investigations that have been launched are centered on whether the U.S. military knew the hospital was nearby when an AC-130 gunship opened fire and whether the clinic was being used by the Taliban to launch attacks.

Thus far, no U.S. or Afghan personnel have been able to gain access to the hospital because the area remains contested, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said Sunday. He called the situation “confused and complicated.”

The investigations “will be, and needs to be, full and transparent," Carter told reporters aboard the Pentagon's E-4B “Doomsday” plane en route to Madrid. “There will be accountability, as always in these incidents, if that is required.”

Still more.