Classroom desks and chairs sit amid rubble at the Shajareh Tayyebeh school, damaged in a Feb 28 US airstrike in Minab (Photo: AP)
The strikes killed more than 150, including nearly 120 schoolchildren, according to Iranian officials. The mission reached a comparable finding regarding a strike on a sports centre in Lamerd, which it said damaged nearby homes and a school and killed or wounded 22 civilians. It judged this strike, too, to have been indiscriminate and therefore a war crime.
Reuters had earlier reported that a preliminary internal US military inquiry indicated American forces were probably to blame for the deadly Minab strike in southern Iran.
The UN investigators said there were reasonable grounds to conclude that US forces carried out the attack on Shajareh Tayyebeh Primary School in Minab. The US would have struck the school while knowing there was a real chance of hitting a civilian site, and would have behaved recklessly about the possibility that this would occur, according to the report. In June, US President Donald Trump stated that “nobody” purposefully attacked a girls’ school in Iran in February, pointing to an ongoing inquiry into the episode. UN investigators said the school was plainly a civilian site and found nothing to suggest it had any military use.
An independent UN fact-finding mission on Iran announced on Thursday that it found US involvement in two military strikes involving a school and a sports facility in February, calling them war crimes.