The eight Americans that died yesterday in a suicide bombing at a military base in eastern Afghanistan were all CIA agents, according to US officials.

The bombing happened at Forward Operating Base Chapman in Khost province near the border with Pakistan.

The US officials said they could not provide details pending notification of the agents' families. CIA officials were not immediately available to comment.

The deaths were confirmed late in the evening by an American official in the Afghan capital Kabul.

A senior US official in Washington said the Americans were killed by an attacker wearing a suicide vest.

He said there were conflicting reports on the number of casualties and that other people were wounded in the attack.

The attack came on the day that an Afghan presidential delegation investigating the deaths of 10 people in eastern Afghanistan concluded that civilians — including children — were killed in an attack involving foreign troops, disputing Nato reports that the dead were insurgents.

Asadullah Wafa, a senior adviser to President Hamid Karzai, said eight children between the ages of 12 and 14 were among the dead discovered in a village house in the Narang district of Kunar province. A Nato official has said initial reports from troops involved in the fighting on Sunday indicated that those killed were insurgents — all young males.

Several hundred Afghans protested against the deaths yesterday in the eastern city of Jalalabad and in Kabul.

In Jalalabad they burnt US President Barack Obama's effigy and an American flag, chanting “death to Obama and Karzai”.

In Kabul protesters chanted: “Unity, unity, death to the enemy of Islam!”, and a protester with a bullhorn called on Mr Obama to “take your soldiers out of Afghanistan”.

Mr Wafa said he was convinced that all those killed in the Kunar incident were innocent civilians. “I have talked to the principal of the school in the village and he gave us details about the killed children,” he said.

“The schoolchildren cannot be al-Qaida. I confirm they are innocent people killed by mistake. I talked to President Karzai about the findings.”

The bodies had already been buried by the time Mr Wafa's team arrived. A joint Afghan-Nato probe will continue to investigate what happened.

Col Wayne Shanks, spokesman for Nato's International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan, said at a news conference yesterday that the allegations were being investigated together with Afghan authorities.

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Belfast Telegraph