Rights Group Forces US to Investigate Deadly Drone Strike on Wedding

Evidence gathered by a human rights group has forced the Obama administration to investigate a deadly drone strike that targeted a wedding party in Yemen and killed a dozen people.

The December 12 drone strike carried out by the Joint Special Operations Command was said to be targeting “al-Qaeda militants” but instead left a trail of scorched civilian corpses including those of children.

“You cannot imagine how angry people are,” local Yemeni journalist Nasser Al-Sane, who took video and photographic evidence of the strike, told NBC News. “They turned a wedding into a funeral.”

In the aftermath of the strike, Baraa Shiban with the UK-based charity Reprieve led an investigation into the attack and found that the 12 people killed and others that were injured had no militant connections but were simply guests going to a wedding.

Claims by the U.S. that the strike was targeting suspected al Qaeda operative Shawqui Ali Ahmed al Badani don’t stack up, Reprieve said in a statement, because Badani is from a distant region of Yemen with no connections to the villages affected by the strike.