The US killed multiple civilians in southern Iran using new “precision” missiles with a wide damage radius, conflict monitoring group Airwars has found. Tehran has repeatedly accused Washington of war crimes since the US and Israel launched a war on Iran which has killed up to 3,000 civilians.
In an investigation published on Monday, the London-based watchdog examined three February 28 strikes in the city of Lamerd that killed at least 21 civilians, including seven children. It concluded that the weapons used were likely Lockheed Martin’s Precision Strike Missiles (PrSM), which made their combat debut during the opening phase of the US-Israeli war on Iran.
The PrSM is designed to explode above the ground, spraying tens of thousands of dense tungsten pellets in all directions rather than relying primarily on the blast itself.
Airwars found that civilians were killed at least 50 meters from the estimated detonation points, while damage extended as far as 150 meters. The three missiles exploded over two residential neighborhoods and a sports center.
Among those killed was a two-year-old girl struck while playing outside her home around 50 meters from one blast. Another strike over a sports hall killed seven civilians, most of them children.
No military personnel were reported killed, and Airwars found no evidence that military infrastructure had been hit. A nearby Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps compound appeared undamaged.
The Associated Press separately reviewed the evidence and consulted six weapons experts, including two former military officials, who also assessed that PrSMs were responsible for the strikes.
“You would be hard-pressed to find a reason to use the PrSM in a densely populated area,” former US Army adviser Michael Meier told AP.
US Central Command has acknowledged deploying PrSMs against Iran, describing their use as a “historic first,” but has denied firing any weapons at Lamerd. It has instead suggested that an Iranian cruise missile was to blame, although weapons experts cited by AP and Airwars disputed that assessment.
The PrSM had only recently completed its prototype phase and had not completed operational testing before its combat debut in Iran. A US Army official later said a deployed unit exhausted its entire stock of the missiles early in the war. Washington has since committed billions of dollars to expanding production.
Tehran has repeatedly accused Washington of war crimes over strikes on civilian areas. The Lamerd attack came on the same day as the US bombing of an elementary school in Minab, which killed 175 people, most of them children.
The Airwars findings come as direct US-Iran hostilities resumed over the weekend after a month-long lull. Washington struck Iran’s Larak Island on Sunday, prompting Tehran to launch missiles and drones at US military facilities in Jordan.
US President Donald Trump has since threatened another round of attacks, saying Washington would “hit Iran hard.”