Another official said up to 25 of the men were killed in the bombing late Nov. 27 in an area of the rugged Nuristan province about 112 miles northeast of Kabul.

"We had reports that rebels were there," Nuristan governor Tamimi Nuristani told AFP.

"There was an airstrike by coalition forces but later we found out that 12 people, all local road workers, were killed. The road workers were in a tent which was hit by one bomb. All died," he said.

The US-led coalition media office said it was trying to find out what happened. "Something happened but we are not sure exactly what," spokesman Major Chris Belcher said.

The province's police chief said he was trying to verify the incident.

Nuristani said the men were from an Afghan construction company that was building a road in the remote area.

In another bombing in the same province, 12 militants were killed, the governor said.

The head of the Nuristan provincial council, Taj Mohammad, said 25 people were killed in the strikes and they were all civilian road workers.

"We collected their flesh and put it in bags. We handed the remains of the ones we could recognise to their families," he said.

Nuristan is an isolated mountain province on the border with Pakistan that has seen occasional fighting between security forces and the Taliban.

The US-led coalition helped remove the extremist Taliban from government in 2001 and is now working with the Afghan security forces and a separate NATO-led force to end an insurgency by the hardliners, who are allied with Al-Qaeda.

Civilian casualties in the international operation against the Taliban and other militants is a deeply sensitive issue and President Hamid Karzai has regularly urged military forces to take more care.

Several hundred civilians are believed to have been killed by international soldiers fighting the insurgents this year, but no official figure has been released.

They are often difficult to verify, with officials releasing conflicting statements and because they occur in areas that are difficult to access.

Critics blame the military's reliance on air power in remote areas and also accuse soldiers of a disproportionate use of force.

NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said after talks with Karzai last week that civilian casualties were unavoidable in the fight but the alliance's deployment here had adapted its tactics to try to reduce them.

"Every time I meet the president, we discuss civilian casualties because, like the president, I and the NATO allies suffer each innocent civilian Afghan killed," he told reporters then.

The Taliban-led insurgency has intensified this year with more than 5,000 people estimated to have been killed since January -- most of them rebel fighters.

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