Pakistan border fire provoked NATO raid: Reports

ISLAMABAD: The West is striving to limit the fallout from a deadly NATO air raid on Pakistani border troops, but reports the soldiers opened fire first on US and Afghan forces risked stoking new tensions.

Pakistan is simmering over the killings of the 24 soldiers, with fiery weekend protests denouncing the assault by NATO helicopters and fighter jets on two military posts on the Afghan border early Saturday.

The United States, which depends on Pakistan as a vital lifeline to supply 130,000 foreign troops fighting in landlocked Afghanistan, on Sunday scrambled to salvage the alliance, backing a full inquiry and expressing condolences.

NATO secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen also sought to soothe Islamabad's rage, but stopped short of issuing a full apology for the "tragic, unintended" killings.

In retaliation for the raid, Islamabad has blocked NATO convoys from crossing into Afghanistan, ordered a review of its alliance with the US and mulled whether to boycott a key conference on Afghanistan next month.

Hundreds of enraged Pakistanis took to the streets Sunday, burning an effigy of President Barack Obama and setting fire to US flags across the country of 167 million where opposition to the government's US alliance is rampant.

Pakistan says the attack was unprovoked.

Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar telephoned US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Sunday to convey a "deep sense of rage" as a joint funeral was held for the dead soldiers, their coffins draped in the national flag.

But a report in Monday's Wall Street Journal - denied by Islamabad - said the NATO jets and helicopters responded to firing from a Pakistani post on the ill-defined Afghan border.

The article, which followed a similar report by Britain's Guardian newspaper, cited three Afghan officials and one Western official as saying the air raid was called in to shield allied forces targeting Taliban fighters.

NATO and Afghan forces "were fired on from a Pakistani army base", the unnamed Western official told the Wall Street Journal. "It was a defensive action."

An Afghan official in Kabul was quoted as saying: "There was firing coming from the position against Afghan army soldiers who requested support and this is what happened."

The official added that the government in Kabul believes the fire came from the Pakistani military base -- and not from insurgents in the area.

There was no official US response to the report. (AFP)