CBC

Mon Aug 14, 7:09 am

RAF bombs only 40% accurate, says BBC

Most of the bombs dropped on Kosovo last year by British planes missed their targets, according to an investigation by the BBC and Flight International Magazine.

The Royal Air Force flew more than 1,500 missions in the 78-day campaign to drive Slobodan Milosovic's Serbian forces out of Kosovo, and more than 1,000 bombs were dropped.

Flight International Magazine and the BBC say classified documents from the Defence Ministry about 400 hit their marks. Some types of bomb hit as few as two per cent of their targets.

That suggests civilian casualties might have been worse than previously thought.

But Junior Defence Minister John Spellar says the numbers in the report are misleading because of the way the statistics were recorded.

"A lot of them were recorded as bombs not accounted for and that's exactly right," he said. "What they were recording was actual observable direct hits and in cloud that's quite difficult.

Carol Reed, the Editor of Flight International magazine said in her opinion publishing reports like this one is in the public interest.

In February the Ministry of Defence held a news conference in which it said the Kosovo bombing campaign had been the best ever carried out by the RAF.

-- Rachel Gibson (rgibson@hotmail.com), August 15, 2000