How we identified Afghan house hit in reported Pakistan air strikepublished at 16:28 GMT
16:28 GMT
Reha Kansara, Emma Pengelly and Mahfouz Zubaide
BBC Verify and BBC News
Pakistan’s military has denied Taliban claims it carried out air strikes in Afghanistan – calling them “baseless and factually incorrect”.
We’ve been looking for evidence to support the claim by Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid that Pakistan had carried out attacks in Khost, Paktika and Kunar provinces – all three locations close to the border separating the two countries.
The Taliban say at least 10 people, including nine children, were killed in an attack in Khost province.
In photos and videos posted on social media and claiming to be from Asadabad in Kunar province, we see a heavily damaged house with one side blown out and the second floor destroyed.
With the help of BBC Afghan and by speaking to people on the ground we learned the house was near Kunar Prison in the Sagi area. Sagi, however, does not show up on Google Earth so we used a map from UN agency OCHA, external which covers the district’s villages.
We then got in touch with an Afghan colleague, who is from the area, who was able to show us the location of the prison.
We also worked with Afghan Witness, external, a project by the Centre for Information Resilience, to search the area for structures matching those in the footage.
We finally identified it by matching the shape of the building, perimeter wall, nearby buildings and mountain topography with Google satellite imagery.