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Witnesses who brought people they said were wounded in the attack to hospital in Jalalabad also told an AFP reporter that several people were killed and wounded in the strikes in the eastern province of Nangarhar.

But senior Afghan officials could not immediately confirm the claims of civilian casualties and the US-led coalition denied civilians were hit, saying "several" militants were killed.

The allegations could not be independently verified as the area, the Deh Bala district on the border with Pakistan, is remote and difficult to access.

It was the second time in days the force faced charges of high civilian casualties in strikes on militants with Afghan officials saying more than a dozen died in Nuristan province Friday, a claim also rejected by the coalition.

Deh Bala governor Hamisha Gul said 22 people were killed Sunday and several more wounded when the air strikes hit people gathered for a wedding.

"I confirm that 22 people, three of them men and 19 of them women and children, were killed," he told AFP. Gul said his information came from police and other officials he had dispatched to the area to investigate.

About 70 people, mostly women, were escorting a bride to meet her groom in traditional Afghan fashion, said a man from the area who gave his name only as Kerate.

"We were bombed. I couldn't figure out what had happened and I went unconscious. When I woke up, I saw lots of people killed and injured," he told AFP at the hospital in Jalalabad, the provincial capital.

"After the bombing, I saw several people wounded and killed," said another man, who gave his name as Awrang.

"I picked up some of the wounded and brought them here. I learnt later that my wife, my daughter and my sisters were killed."

About five people with apparently minor injuries were admitted to the Jalalabad hospital. About four wounded women and children were treated at a clinic in the Deh Bala centre, said doctor Abdul Qader Shinwary.

The US-led coalition rejected the allegations.

"It was not a wedding party, there were no women or children present. We have no reports of civilian casualties," coalition media officer Captain Christian Patterson told AFP.

Between five and 10 militants were killed, said another spokesman Sergeant First Class Joel Peavy.

It was not clear if they were from the Taliban insurgent movement or the radical Al-Qaeda network also active in the area, he told AFP.

The seven-year internationally supported campaign to fight a bloody Taliban-led insurgency has seen several incidents in which civilians were killed, as well as claims of civilian casualties that have proven untrue.

In most cases the incidents involve air strikes on remote areas. The international forces employ several measures to confirm the identities of their targets.

In 2002 a US bombing raid on a wedding party in the southern province of Uruzgan killed 48 people and left scores more wounded, according to a UN investigation.

The coalition and a separate NATO-led force are helping the Afghan government fight a bloody campaign by Islamic extremists largely from the Taliban who were in government between 1996 and 2001.

In other violence, a suicide car bomb against a vehicle carrying EU police trainers in northern Afghanistan Sunday wounded seven people, officials said.

Three were German police and four were Afghans, including three children, they said.

In the central province of Ghazni, meanwhile, nine suspected militants including two Arabs and a Pakistani national were killed in a blast from explosives they were working on, a government official said.

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