Berlin- Two of Germany's highest military officials lost their jobs Thursday and a former defence minister came under severe pressure, accused of covering up their knowledge of civilian casualties of a bombing raid in Afghanistan. The resignation of the armed forces' top officer, General Wolfgang Schneiderhan,, was announced by Defence Minister Karl Theodor zu Guttenberg in parliament at the opening of a debate on the extension of the German military presence in Afghanistan.
The mass-circulation Bild newspaper said Thursday that the government had held back video and eyewitness reports detailing civilian casualties in a German-ordered airstrike in Kunduz on September 4.
In addition, a State Secretary of Defence, Peter Wichert, resigned his post.
In the attack, a German officer called a US airstrike on two hijacked fuel tankers, in which up to 142 people died. The exact number of civilian victims is as yet unknown, but is suspected to be in the dozens.
In the days after the event, then-defence minister Franz Josef Jung told the newspaper that "according to the information I have at this time, only Taliban fighters were killed" in the bombing.
However Bild revealed that the previously-secret video and eyewitness accounts by German soldiers of civilian victims had been passed to the military headquarters near Berlin on the same day as the attack.
Parliamentarians demanded that Jung explain his actions. He promised to speak before the house later Thursday.
Social Democratic opposition leader Frank-Walter Steinmeier told the German Press Agency
