The report, for the first time, portrays lack of urgency by the Nato officers in notifying their superiors of the unfolding late-night debacle. - File Photo

WASHINGTON: A military investigation has concluded that it took about 90 minutes for Nato officers to notify a senior commander about Pakistan’s calls that its outposts were under attack, underscoring a lack of timely senior-level “override” measures to avoid deadly cross-border errors like last month’s air strikes that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers.

Once alerted, the commander immediately halted American attacks on two Pakistani border posts.

But by then, military communications between the two sides had sorted out a chain of errors and the shooting had already stopped.

The delays — by two different officers — raise questions about whether a faster response could have spared the lives of some Pakistani soldiers.

An unclassified version of the report, released on Monday by the military’s Central Command on its website, also revealed for the first time that an American AC-130 gunship flew two miles into Pakistani territory to return fire on Pakistani troops who had attacked a joint American-Afghan ground patrol just across the border in Afghanistan.

The 30-page report, which expanded upon a telephone briefing last week by the chief investigator, Brig Gen Stephen A. Clark of the Air Force, also found that competing Nato and American rules of engagement related to border-area and cross-border operations “lacked clarity and precision, and were not followed”.

The full report alters and expands upon the impression of the inquiry’s findings created by General Clark`s briefing, which had stressed how checks and balances on both sides failed.

The report, for the first time, portrays unexplained delays and a lack of urgency by Nato officers in notifying their superiors of the unfolding late-night debacle that plunged relations between the two countries to new lows.—Agencies